This is the single most amusing review of a NYC restaurant I’ve read since Frank Bruni reviewed Ninja for the NYT.
And a side reference on the EaterNY site led me to “Soul Daddy”. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with “Soul Daddy”: very few people were. The chain (of three restaurants: NY, LA, and the Mall of America) was the “prize” on an NBC reality series called America’s Next Great Restaurant, which nobody watched.
“Nobody” includes me, but I did follow the recaps on the A/V Club website. I hadn’t thought about “Soul Daddy” for the better part of a year, and wasn’t surprised to find out the restaurants were defunct. It did surprise me, though, that they only lasted just about two months. (Apparently, the NY and LA locations closed after six weeks so they could concentrate on the Mall of America location; that closed two weeks later.) LA Weekly has a good summary of why it failed. (Important safety tip: if you’re going to start a restaurant, it helps to have food that doesn’t suck.)
What I wonder is: how do you throw $3 million down the drain in two months? Were the locations that expensive? (Maybe.) Were the construction costs that high? (I can see that, especially if they were trying to keep the actual concept secret until the day after the last episode: that probably took a lot of bribes payments to the construction crew.) Or did they not actually burn through $3 million, and the investors just said “F— you” and pulled the plug after NBC cancelled the show?