http://www.packetonline.com/articles/2008/11/06/cranbury_press/lifestyle/doc49132d6814150253679439.txtLocal restaurant faces reality
Hannah and Masons to be featured on "Restaurant Nightmares"
Thursday, November 6, 2008 1:31 PM EST
By Maria Prato-Gaines, Staff Writer
CRANBURY — Reality TV can be pretty bad, as two local restaurant owners found out after a recent taping for an episode on Fox Network’s hit “Kitchen Nightmares.”
Camera crews knocked on this Main Street bistro’s door more than eight months ago, but the episode featuring this Cranbury favorite, Hannah and Masons, wasn’t aired until Thursday.
Although the show typically features foul-mouthed and brash British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay haranguing an incompetent staff, and taking a mediocre restaurant from failure to fabulous, Hannah and Masons co-owners, Brian Kelly and Christopher Posner said they weren’t expecting the full treatment.
”It’s national publicity,” Mr. Kelly said of their decision to audition for the show. “Of course, I figured we wouldn’t be the norm.”
”The whole thing was my idea,” Mr. Posner said. “I just kept saying it’s going to pay off.”
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Adding to their sense of security, a production crew arrived days prior to Chef Ramsay on the week of Valentine’s Day and raved about the food, especially the lamb, Mr. Posner said.
But once Chef Ramsay arrived, all heck broke loose.
”He came in on Thursday and that’s when you could feel the tension — even from the production crew,” Mr. Posner said.
Chef Ramsay tried about five-to-six items on the menu, but was quick to let the guys know his palette wasn’t easily pleased.
”This tastes like dirty dishwater — terrible, terrible, terrible,” Mr. Posner said in his best British accent, remembering Chef Ramsay’s run-in with restaurant’s coveted onion soup. “He hated everything. But I know it’s not terrible, we have hundreds of loyal customers and they say it’s not terrible.”
Chef Ramsay scolded the owners for not buying fresh local produce and straying away from their rural roots on the menu.
”He said, ‘you’re in the middle of farm country, in the middle of nowhere,” Mr. Posner said. “But we’re not in the middle of nowhere. You’re (also) not buying local produce in February.”
To stick with the country theme, Chef Ramsay also decided to push the idea of a farmers-market feel. So the owners were told to sell produce inside the restaurant, an idea that had already been played out in Cranbury’s small business corridor and was quickly shot down by a local health inspector, Mr. Kelly said.
”I explained, you gave us a concept people are doing five doors down,” Mr. Kelly said. “They didn’t do their homework.”
Even more frustrating was when these hands-on owners were excluded from revamping their own menu. Chef Ramsay scrapped house favorites like the lamb and crab cakes, replacing them with unfamiliar and often less appealing country fares like fresh eggs over beef hash and salmon-crab cakes, they said.
”We know our customer base,” Mr. Posner said. “It wasn’t a good response.”
Although a couple of the chef’s items have managed to hold a place on the menu or have been worked into weekly specials, after a number of complaints from their long-time customers, the owners brought back the dishes that made them a local favorite in the first place, they said.
”He was playing house,” Mr. Posner said. “He built something he thought was essential in this location.”
Along with the menu changes, crews knocked down a wall, which the owners later put back up and replaced the previous warm earthy tones with a trendy blue paint, that still seems at odds with the antique feel of the place.
”I wasn’t kicked in the head about it,” Mr. Posner said. “A lot of people like the way it looked before. It was more bistro-wine bottles, rich colors.”
In addition to some structural changes, the show replaced a large deli case with a smaller one, and threw out several malfunctioning and large appliances, that could have been repaired, without notification, the owners said.
To add to the restaurant’s external dilemmas, internal conflicts began to brew among the employees, who were often pitted against each other during the tapings, the owners said.
One mishap viewers will likely see on the episode exposes the mixture of both raw and cooked chicken, an incident both owners said has never happened before or since and wouldn’t be a huge problem unless they served the already cooked meat.
Camera crews also caught employees complaining about bouncing pay checks, which both Mr. Posner and Mr. Kelly admit might happen on a rare occasion but typically dealt with in haste.
Despite their humiliation, now that Hannah and Masons staff have recovered from their “Kitchen Nightmares hangover” both owners are hoping that the ends will justify the means.
”We have a really, really loyal customer base,” Mr. Posner said. “But it’s tough and it’s getting tougher. It’s the economy. We wanted to reach out to a much larger audience.”
At the end of the day, if the crowds don’t come, at least Hannah and Masons got its 15 minutes of fame, not to mention a whole stash of expensive Gordon Ramsey Royal Daulton china.
”It’s more show less reality,” Mr. Posner said. “If we get a lot of business then it was worth it. If we don’t then it was a complete waste.”
