Maggie's Farm

Between Spring 1998 and Fall 2002, we (my late wife and I) started, owned and operated a small (25-seat) delicatessen-style restaurant here in coastal North Carolina. Since it was in a beachfront community on a coastal barrier island, there was (and still is) a distinct "season", as most of the clientele for most of the businesses there is tourist trade. There are a few (but only a very few) food businesses there that operate year-round. Therefore, you must maximize your repeat business during the 6- to 8-months tourist season, if you want to survive.

Many restaurants came and went there (and still do) in one or two seasons. The ones that failed (and continue to fail) followed the same pattern seen here - an arrogant ignorance coupled with almost incredibly poor quality of food and/or service.

We survived quite well, even made a small profit (our place is still there, though under a different business name and owned/operated by other people), well past the 4-year mark, after which roughly 90 to 95 percent of all food businesses are gone, because of a rigid insistence upon the highest degree of cleanliness, food quality and customer service of which we were capable. Nothing was ever frozen except extra bread and dough (which is not damaged by proper freezing, if used within a week), and some fruit juice and soup concentrates - everything else was fresh.

During the season, we were always busy - and much of our business was repeat business, with (after awhile) a fair amount coming from local people, not just tourists and other transients. Places that actually serve good food are difficult enough to find that, if you do it right, people come back, again and again.

That's not easy or simple - even if your menu is relatively simple, as ours was - and it requires a lot of planning and a lot of work, but it's do-able, and it's well worth doing.

If you can't do that, though, you're in the wrong business. There is no food that is improved by freezing, and most - including all meats and seafoods - sustain damage to at least some extent, as far as flavor and quality are concerned.

There are simply a lot of people who have little or no understanding of what is required to prepare and serve good quality food in a clean and efficient manner - and most will simply never understand how really badly they are treating their customers. Many, in their supreme arrogance, don't even want to know - they are blind to the facts, secure in their belief that they are doing everything just the way it should be done.

End result: A lot of mediocre-to-really bad restaurants - which, fortunately, don't last very long. People simply don't come back - and word gets around. After awhile - unless, somehow, they improve the place - the money runs out, and they close up, after running at a loss for awhile.

I have no idea how "real life" the places in that show are - there's not very much reality in most "reality TV", after all - but a lot of the stuff looks like it's based on what produced the results I saw in a lot of food places while doing research before we opened our restaurant. Most people simply never seem to grasp that they are supposed to operate to please the customer, not just to suit themselves - and their businesses show that attitude.