Watch Restaurant Takeover

Restaurant Takeover is a popular television series that aired on the Cooking Channel in 2012. Featuring a talented team of experts in the restaurant industry, the show follows the journeys of struggling restaurants and their owners as they seek out the help of professional chefs and designers to revamp their businesses.

Hosted by the renowned Corbin Tomaszeski, a celebrity chef and restaurateur, the show also features the expertise of Paula Velez, a top-flight chef and culinary consultant, and Montana Burnett, a talented restaurant and bar designer. Together, this trio of industry stalwarts travel across North America to help struggling restaurants revamp their menus, decor, and customer service operations.

Throughout the course of the show's entire run, viewers are taken on a journey that challenges the culinary skills of the featured restaurants' owners and chefs. The show's premise is simple: Corbin, Paula, and Montana are tasked with restoring the fortunes of ailing restaurants, using their expertise and experience to identify problems and find solutions to turn around the businesses.

The problems the team faces range from mediocre and uninspired menus, cramped and outdated decor, and lackluster customer service. The team meets with the owners of the restaurants, learning about their particular issues, and then gets to work creating a plan to rejuvenate the business.

Once the goals are identified, the restaurateurs are tasked with undergoing a complete and rapid transformation of their restaurant. The show's highlight is the "restaurant takeover" itself, where the chefs work together to create a completely new menu from scratch, while Montana oversees the complete redesign of the interior space.

In addition to providing the owners with a new brand identity, the team also focuses heavily on training the staff of the restaurant, emphasizing the importance of customer service and helping them to develop the skills they need to deliver a quality dining experience. Throughout the transformation process, the owners are required to remain hands-on, working alongside the team to create a new vision of what their restaurant could be.

As each episode progresses, viewers are also given an inside look into the daily workings of the restaurant, with cameras capturing the interactions between the chefs and the owners as they work together to develop their new menus, train staff, and implement new systems to boost the restaurant's bottom line.

One of the most significant draws of Restaurant Takeover is the fact that the chefs and designers do not hold back in their criticism. They are brutally honest about the current state of the restaurants they're working with, highlighting areas in which owners need to improve if they're to succeed in the highly competitive world of hospitality.

While the show is a reality TV series, it's clear that the team behind Restaurant Takeover genuinely wants to help struggling restaurants. Rather than creating drama for the sake of ratings, they make sure that the owners and employees of the restaurants they are helping understand that the changes being made are for their benefit.

In the end, the show presents a hopeful message: that with the right guidance, dedication, and willingness to adapt, almost any restaurant can be turned around, made profitable, and, most importantly, deliver a memorable dining experience to its customers.

Overall, Restaurant Takeover is a great show for anyone interested in the restaurant industry, hospitality, cooking or interior design. It's a perfect mix of reality TV drama and inspirational makeover show, with a great cast of experts that provides viewers with a glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of running a successful restaurant.

Restaurant Takeover is a series that ran for 2 seasons (22 episodes) between August 12, 2013 and on Cooking Channel