I've become a food-porn addict

After having railed against the TV genre that glamorizes the exploitation of low-wage labor in one cooking show after another, I have to admit I'm hooked on Guy Fieri's "triple d" show.

It's not just a food show, it's a people show. I love the back-stories. It's always people with a dream, quite often immigrants, and half the time they have no training or background in the restaurant business.

They find themselves with some low-end real estate, because that's all they can afford, and go to work.

Work is the operative word here. Any successful restaurant folks I've ever know are pretty much living at the place, at least during the start-up years. Often they literally live at the place. It's a way to make limited start-up capital go a lot farther.

Then they develop a specialty or two by trial and error. This works, how can I make it better? That didn't work, forget about it and move on.

Had a buddy who opened a little hole in the wall place on Cork Street in Guelph. He called it "The Hole In The Wall". He knew diddly about restaurants and not much more about cooking.

Buddy never did have have the "live there" mentality, and what he managed to do with his limited skills and his limited work ethic made me think, hey, I could do that.

First of all, he quickly decided to confine himself to the lunch trade. Open at 11 and close the door at two. With prep and clean-up he's got himself a four hour work-day.

Sweet!

That still might have worked, but he never managed to build a reputation for a particular specialty that people would come back for. He'd score some random winners but not follow up.

For example, he had the garden salad with deviled eggs special one day, for the simple reason that he had three dozen eggs in the fridge and a couple of heads of Romaine and not much else. It was a home run! Sold out.

And then you never saw it on his menu again. He went bankrupt after about a year, and the only thing he accomplished was getting "open restaurant" off his bucket list.

Which I suppose is my roundabout way of justifying this food porn addiction. I still want to open a restaurant before I kick the bucket, and watching Diners, Drive-ins and Dives for two hours every day is research.

Watch for the grand opening of Neumann's Lunch, home of the world's best kielbosa sandwich...