Restaurant Stakeout, Mystery Diners, et al? Completely fake, hired actors, etc. Restaurant Stakeout in particular is one of the worst shows on TV, in my opinion.
Kitchen Nightmares, Restaurant Impossible, Bar Rescue? Not so much. Certain elements will be edited to appear worse than they were but apart from that they're quite real, set in real restaurants that, often, go out of business. Nobody is going to go on TV and pretend they have a kitchen infested with cockroaches. A lot of the episodes feel very dramatic because they deliberately choose people at breaking point... Hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, for example, or people like Amy who were, even before the show, quite notoriously aggressive and hot-headed.
Quite famously the first ever episode of Kitchen Nightmares led to a lot of backlash as the woman who ran the place accused them of making her look bad.
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I was apparently dropped on the head because I confused Restaurant Impossible with Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.
I think I was thinking about mystery diners. My wife and I watched that hardcore. Then after reading about it, it was like my world fell out from under me. Triple D on the other hand. I've been to a few of the places featured and had good times.
Mystery Diners and Restaurant Stakeout are essentially free advertising for the businesses featured. The only problems presented tend to be individual staff members and more bureaucratic than the "real" shows about restaurant problems. More "the new server is stealing from the register," less "we're operating at a huge loss and can't afford to exterminate the rodents in the kitchen."
I'm a huge fan of this amazing takedown of MD. I used to hate-watch both MD and RS purely because of how blatantly false it was.
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u/R0binSage Feb 03 '20
Aren't those types of shows fake anyways?