Location: Newbury Park, California
The owner believes a catering business is the same as running a dine-in restaurant and her Head Chef/former Head of Catering (who barely speaks English) is so far out of her element that she has no experience with cooking fresh food, leaving the freezers jam packed with frozen products.
Tropes
- Berserk Button: Gordon becomes absolutely furious when he finds tons of frozen products in the freezer, some of them being over a year old, and lets Laura know about that.
- Department of Redundancy Department: This exchange.Gordon: What's wrong with the place?
Cheryl: Lack of customers.
Gordon: So why have you got a lacking of customers?
Cheryl: We need more customers. - Downer Ending: Despite Ramsay's best efforts, Laura has let Naris go after several weeks, brought Perla back as the head chef and went back to the old menu, and Mama Rita's closed down in 2010. After that, Laura's had a more successful café called Mission Oaks Café that she ran until 2019, while her catering business is still going on.
- Eloquent in My Native Tongue: Perla's limited grasp of English makes her speech a bit stunted, but she's much better at Spanish.
- Head-in-the-Sand Management: Laura at first seems to be unaware that her restaurant is floundering due to putting an inexperienced chef at the helm and being too chummy with her.
- Oven Logic: Perla uses the timings of the food she used to microwave to cooking actual dishes.
- The Peter Principle: Perla is great at dealing with catering, but she's unable to run a kitchen due to her not having the necessary skills. This was a microcosm of the restaurant as a whole. While the business was successful as a catering, its relentless focus on speed and quantity over quality completely tanked it as a standalone restaurant.
- Take a Third Option: Faced with either firing Perla or keeping her as the head chef, Laura makes a decision to put her into her previous position of the head of catering.
