The Restaurant 2009

I love The Restaurant but much preferred last year's format.

Sarah reminRAB me more and more of Dobby from Peep Show with each episode that goes by.

How on earth did the cocktail blokes get through to this stage?!
 
Thanks, Buck! I really do appreciate reading your posts - they have been the highlight of this series! Thnink someone should collate your posts and email them to the BBC producers as wel as M. Blanc!

(why is there no 'claps' smiley?)!
 
Hi everyone

I've registered for an account for rabroad just to come on here and share a few thoughts I have about this series.

From about the second week on, it was clear something had seriously gone wrong in the programme, and this surprised me. I attended an event at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August where Raymond Blanc gave a passionate talk about his life and his love of food, peppered with exciting anecdotes from someone who was obviously charming, intelligent and extremely happy- the personable Raymond from Series 1 and 2.

He promised us that Series 3 would be different, that it would be "more hanRAB on...more intelligent, more real" (you can check the audio yourself - it's in the final 7 or 8 minutes where he discusses The Restaurant - http://ow.ly/LtwV). He said he didn't like the craziness of being considered a guru who would give out challenges, or criticise people in the boardroom, and that the focus would be on real world challenges which would make a much better programme and would reflect the reality of running a restaurant. Note: he was talking, I am presuming, *after* the filming of Series 3.

I think it is clear that the programme did not live up to those aims, and perhaps this is because Raymond - a chef, not a producer - had a more central role in deciding how the programme was to run. But I also don't think of M Blanc as an idiot either. Consider the following: why was the budget slashed? Was it that perhaps Raymond was fed up with the idea of the programme and was essentially persuaded back with the lure of presenting his own food programme? And that, from the rocky experience of dealing with the previous two winners he was neither prepared to foot the bill himself (this series had 2 other investors), nor really to seriously waste the money on people who were not certain to succeed in this economic climate. Hence the curious whittling down of the contestants very early on in the series and the neutered sense of how any of them were doing financially.

I think it was made very clear during the Tea Dance episode that the Winkers were extremely good salesmen and that their combination of initiative and charm had the effect of charming the investors (sorry... judges) that their money would not be wasted. One of the things that was emphasised in the original two series of The Restaurant was that a restaurant was hard work and that it required a combination of skills and business sense (a number of the challenges emphasised either one or both of these). It seems clear that with the poor quality of this year's contestants, RB and his pals were faced with a decision: they would either focus on business acumen or culinary skill. And I think, from what I have seen in this series, they did not quite make up their mind which of these they were the most interested in until they probably got to the final 6. Remember, only one team needed to be thrown out a week, so the fact the Winkers were not eliminated earlier does not reflect they were any good, but that another team either failed a task or did not seem to be an appropriate "business fit" for the RB concept.

Hence the adoption of the businessmen cocktail bar owners as the saviour for the sake of his business interests. If you are investing a considerable sum of money, and you have been let down in the past, you might consider to play it extremely safe. RB had signed a contract with the BBC that he had to fulfil his commitment to "open a restaurant" with the winners of the series. It was implied that this would involve the same template as before - choosing a couple as FoH and chef - and that these two characters would be slotted into an appropriate venue, as had been done in previous years. But I reckon a subtle decision was made at some point in the making of the show that this would not be possible, and that the winners would open a restaurant in heavy consultation with RB and pals, and that they would probably not have as much power as the winners in previous series.

I think RB probably suspected a backlash of some sort, and probably twisted the arm of the producers in June/July to save his reputation by ensuring the production of his cookery show, which would be shown after the car crash that the third series had turned out to be. How much this decision had on the lack of budget of the third series, and when it was made, who can tell?
 
Potatoes (there is an 'e' in that!) are amazing! Seasonal almost all year round! (If kept in the dark like most of this years contestants!)
 
"The weakness of JJ (cannot cook) will be swept away by his obvious talent: cocktail-making. He is after all one of the most talented young British professionals."

As insane a collection of worRAB as you
 
I never realised it but Raymond is a bit of a mad scientist isn't he? Not quite on the same scale as Heston but he certainly has a bit of it in him.
 
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