Location: Woodland Park, Colorado
This two-part special focuses on an Italian restaurant that doesn't know if it wants to be a fast food style business or a sit-down restaurant. The owner's refusal to shut down the drive-thru doesn't help matters.
Tropes
- Bittersweet Ending: Mangia Mangia closed its doors in November 2014 despite initial positivity. Trevor's father posted on Facebook that shortly after the episode was taped, Trevor left Woodland Park for a new life in another town and sought therapy for his drug addiction; per last update, he has been clean for nine months and is undergoing culinary training to be a sous chef. Julie found a new line of work as a real-estate agent, and Janelle found employment in other restaurants like Red Lobster, but was later fired from there for stealing tips.
- Incompetence, Inc.: Holy crap, where do we begin? First of all the décor is still nearly identical from the fast food business, even including a drive-thru window — not carside takeout, a literal drive-thru. Next, microwaves were used to cook everything and none of the ingredients were fresh, so as to be expected, the food was terrible. The owner is in complete denial and every time Ramsay gave a valid criticism, she repeated "I think the food is good" without ever going into detail why. The head chef is a Jerkass with a drug problem who constantly talks back to the owner and even doesn't show up sometimes. The waitress — and owner's daughter — was just as much a Jerkass who made personal attacks towards the head chef, like saying that nobody loved him or cared about his existence and that he'd be better off dead, or insulting his intelligence for failing to make pasta from scratch on what was his first attempt ever. This might as well be the Trope Codifier.
- Master of None: The owner attempted to combine a casual sit-down Italian restaurant with a drive-thru. All this did was rush the food-making process and stress out the staff.
- Wham Shot: When Ramsay checks out the Walk-In, he finds a ludicrous amount of pasta inside containers. He then starts laying them all out on a table and calls Julie to alert her for her discovery. The camera then pans over to the table which is filled to the brim with containers containing (by Ramsay’s estimate) 400 portions of pasta.
