In the series premiere, Jon goes to Corona, California to help rescue Angels Sports Bar, a long-time bar struggling to keep up with the changes in the neighborhood.
Episode Tropes:
- Bad Boss: General Manager Wayne is apathetic to the job, having no care with the job as he used to and even screwing up the payroll for the rest of the staff. Jon sees this and decides to fire him after the Soft Opening.
- Brutal Honesty: Jon's first conversation with Renée is telling her all the problems with Angels, calling it a piece of shit. Although angered by these comments, Renée knew she could not risk throwing him out, as he was her last chance.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Given that this is the first episode, it introduces a few things that are never used again in the later episodes:
- Jon joins Nicole in the recon when he rarely does so in later episodes. This is justified, as Renée did not know what he looked like.
- The Stress Test (which is used to test the skills of the staff after a day of training), is called a Soft Opening.
- Exact Words: During the Soft Opening, one of the servers, Brittany, gets into an argument with Deborah Maguire about her talking with the customers. Brittany argued that she was doing what Deborah told her to do; talk with the patrons. However, Deborah told Brittany that she should talk with the patrons in her section, not with whomever she likes.
- Head Desk: Mixologist Expert Michael Tipps does a soft version after hearing a cocktail server having no idea what a cocktail is.
- Lazy Bum: Rather than clean like he was asked to, Wayne slacked off and walked off, angering the other manager Brad in the process. It's also heavily implied that he slacked off on cleaning the rest of the bar or putting away unnecessary decorations. This leads Jon to call him lazy in the process.
