SpikeTV
When I first heard of Bar Rescue, I lumped it into the group of shows that dads love — you know: American Pickers, Storage Wars, and Pawn Stars. (Partially because my dad absolutely loves it and all those other shows.) But after watching a couple episodes, I realized I was hooked.
Bar Rescue is a reality show on Spike TV that stars Jon Taffer, who goes around to different failing bars in the country where he offers his professional expertise, brings in other experts of the industry, then renovates the bar — all in an attempt to rescue the bar. But that’s not the best part.
Sometimes, more often than not, Taffer also counsels the dysfunctional workers of each bar, which can lead to a lot of drama. Seriously, there are catfights, screaming matches, insult wars, and all-out brawls between coworkers.
While the major drama of the episodes is awesome, it’s also really interesting to see how these different bars and restaurants are operated — especially if you’ve worked in the industry before. It’s fun to yell at the screen when the employees admit that they haven’t cleaned the bar in months or when they serve their tables all wrong because you know better. (They don’t even wipe down the bar!? What are they doing?)
Still, whether you have experience working at a bar/restaurant or not, Bar Rescue makes you think you could probably run your own bar without running it into the ground. Which might be a bad thing, because it often has me quoting Ted and Barney from How I Met Your Mother: “We should buy a bar!” Actually, no, we probably shouldn’t.
