What's in Your Walk-In?

My guilty pleasure is watching the lineup of shows featuring restaurants or bars gone bad. "Kitchen Nightmares," "Restaurant Impossible" and "Bar Rescue" are my favorites. I use our DVR to record the shows and then watch an episode when there is down time later in the evening.

Regardless of the show, the premise is usually the same: a restaurant/bar is having financial troubles. The owner can't understand why they don't have more customers, because they feel the food is perfect and there must be something wrong with people in the area. The host of the show comes in, asks a number of questions and samples the menu. Almost always, the food is atrocious, the staff in disarray and the restaurant itself is dated or dirty. Investigating the food further, our host decides to check out the walk-in cooler.

This is when the dramatic scary music starts. Instead of neatly labeled fresh product, the host finds everything from mold to mice lurking amongst the food awaiting hungry diners. I'll spare you the gory details, but watching these shows does help keep me from doing any midnight snacking. Every episode, I wonder why the owner didn't make sure the walk-in looked good. They knew a TV crew would be alongside the host, inspecting the contents. Taking a little time and making sure things were in great shape would have saved embarrassment and significant verbal berating.

Almost always, the restaurant or bar is totally made-over and attitudes are turned around. It begins making a profit and the staff is rejuvenated. Gordon Ramsay, Robert Irvine or Jon Taffer walks off into the sunset, ready to take on their next challenge.

While those of us with offices, conference rooms and product showrooms might be running to make sure there are no layers of dust on anything our clients might see, making sure that our 'walk- in' is in tip-top shape goes further. Even if our client doesn't physically visit our office, they're getting glimpses of our day-to-day every time they connect with us.