How would you do things differently

[welshman]

There is a feeling that this year's series of the restaurant has been a farce.  Imagine you were a judge on The Restaurant and you were going to invest your money in the winner of the programme.  How would you select the best candidates? What kind of taks would you give the contestants? If you had a say in the selection of the candidates, how do you think the selection process should work? What changes would you make to the format of the programme?  Would you bring back elements which were absent from the third series eg giving people who do badly in task a chance to reedem themselves in the challenge and talking to couples individually where their weaknesses are rather than talking to the whole group together.  

[Minnie]

Selection of candidates:

I strongly suspect that none of the three judges had any say in the selection (with the exception of Smarmy and Clueless who must have been pre-selected ). All of the other couples were chosen by the production team purely for how they would come across on TV, and I would guess that the selection process did not even include a requirement that anyone should be able to demonstrate basic cooking skills

The format:

The main change I would make would be simply to take the format back to how it was in the first two series, with two separate hour-long shows consisting of the initial challenge and analysis and then the bottom two challenge. I would definitely bring back the analysis at the end of the first hour when each of the couples was seen individually and told what their strengths and weaknesses were and what aspect they must concentrate on in the next task.

I would also make sure the tasks were relevant. This year there seemed to be no mention at all of budget, profit or turnover. Giving a cookery demonstration at a food fair was a ridiculous task to impose, because while doing something like that might be a lucrative sideline for a restaurateur it is certainly not a prerequisite of running a restaurant. This year it appeared that the only requirement for success was that they should be able to blag themselves out of doing whatever they were required to do.

One change I would bring in (stolen from the US show The Chopping Block) would be that instead of each couple having their own restaurant there would be only two restaurants. Four couples must work together as a team to run their restaurant. Each week the restaurants were judged by genuine food critics (another good idea) and then one couple from the losing restaurant would be sent home. I think doing it this way one can really judge their leadership skills and also team-working skills.

[welshman]

Although the last series was generally a shambles, I feel one good aspect of the series was to locate the restaurants in a large city like Bristol where the restaurants of the competitors will face intense competition which makes the work of running a restaurant more challenging.  I would give the competitors a level playing field with regard to the location of restaurants.  In all 3 serieses of the restaurants the type of location given to restaurants varied.  Some restaurants where in busy high streets with plenty of passing trade while other restaurants were in out of the way locations.  To make things fair, I would ensure all restaurants had similar types of locations.  Besides the tasks, I would examine the day to running of the restaurants very closely and look carefully at areas such as stock control, pricing, kitchen hygiene and marketing.     

[jedidjahjulia]

I agree with most of what you both have said. Most important for me is the stock/costs aspect. I find it rather strange that this has not been mantioned even once during this series. There was a bit of discussion about the rabbits, one of the couples had only used 4 or so instead of 10 because they couldn't prepare them all and they did think it was a waste of "money" but nothing much was said about it. Stock and pricing is one of the most important things of running a restaurant, at least one task should be about this aspect.