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An apophany is defined as a moment where someone sees a connection that doesn’t literally exist. This is a column about those connections. You can support the author directly at patreon.com/christophersloce. There is exclusive writing there, as well. Try his Youtube criticism 

Getting more acquainted with business owners through my partner’s various day jobs, it’s hard to not come away aghast at these guys and their venal stupidity, especially when their answer for self-imposed issues is always “must be my employees”. There are cases where someone opens a business because the dream in a society ruled by employment is to have employees. Sometimes someone who comes into money and thinks because their entire life money has to be invested to be valuable, but they don’t want to buy stocks. And they’ve always had a dream of owning the place where everyone goes, where everyone is happy to be. 

So they buy a bar. Bars are fun. Then one day, they wake up, how they’re 400k in debt, how their business isn’t successful, and why there’s a raccoon in the establishment. Luckily, there’s a man to tell them how and why they fucked up. His name is Jon Taffer, and if you own a bar and aren’t good at it, he’s your man. 

I don’t love a lot of TV. I love Bar Rescue. Under no circumstance am I arguing that Bar Rescue is in the canon. Jon Taffer isn’t Tony Soprano, New York/New Jersey attitudes aside. The TV shows I love captured my thoughts in the way other art has, enlightening parts of myself I didn’t know existed. The cultural context of Bar Rescue is the point of this essay, but the show doesn’t enlighten much besides why some people I’ve worked for are stupid. 

You would think I’d be the sort of guy who loves Parts Unknown. I’m a depressed guy in his 30s. I respect Bourdain: he was the sort of person you should want to be when you travel, an ideal citizen of the world  type. I like Parts Unknown. I have watched way more Bar Rescue.

You think Bar Rescue is about rescuing bars, but like the business owners it’s bailing out, it’s not as successful as you’d think given the hype. Jon Taffer and company are 1 for 2: 134 bars saved, 134 bars they could not. In the abstract, that’s pretty good. But Jon Taffer is not a mere savior of bars. He is a remaker of people. Jon Taffer is less a consultant than a frogmouthed Mephistopheles: you open up the books and kitchen, let him throw a few fits, and he gives you a renovated business alongside the knowledge to make it in the nightlife business.

It’s rare that the bar owners you encounter on Bar Rescue are entrepreneurial wolves. They have the impulse, if we finally had the ability to do something we want to do without realizing the consequences and responsibilities inherent. They are also not good general managers or bartenders. Because they own the business, they see hiring good staff would require spending more money, so they pull double duty. I bring all this idea of displacement less to defend the humble small business owner. If anything, it’s directed at them for buying into the entire religion of entrepreneurship to begin with. If you can hold somebody’s paycheck over them, then you accept the risks. If your bad behavior means your business partners have to call up the big man, that’s what you set yourself up for when you made yourself responsible for you and everybody else’s money.

I would not say that I learn nothing from Bar Rescue, but its value is mostly illustrative. Here’s an example, using my favorite episode. Dimples Karaoke Bar was the first Karaoke bar in America. Located in Burbank, Dimples was a smash hit at its inception in 1982. Not only was it a bit of a gimmick, it was near all the studio lots, plying celebrities to come through and have a few drinks and sing Rupert Holmes’s “Pina Colada” after work. But Dimples fell into disrepair, and the owner, Sal Ferraro, began buying up Hollywood tchotchkes, which end up taking up a comedic amount of bar space. The tchotckes became more important than updates for the bar.

 By 2013, the bar was going under. Sal’s habit of coming on to bargoers probably didn’t help. His skin looks pulled tight over him, and having a guy try to get you to do a shot with a disgusting, horny name in a dusty bar full of Hollywood memorabilia is creepier than the place already is. His refusal to update anything, though, like a lot of poor business decisions and sexual harassment, is born in the gratification of his own ego. The Hollywood memorabilia doesn’t assist the business when it covers up seating. Updating the sound system actually does. But it requires acknowledging the past has clung on far longer than it should, and that’s not easy, just like clinging onto yesterday’s sexual mores. Entrepeneurs want freedom and nobody is free from time. And all the memorabilia being considered trash means, in some ways, the memories it’s supposed to bring up for you are only valuable to you. All of this contradicts good business sense, but you didn’t go into business to let abstract notions of good sense be your boss. 

Jon Taffer comes through. He trains the staff, tells Sal to quit trying to give away hot blowjob shots or whatever. He even takes on grill duty when the long suffering (and lovable) Italian chef has a panic attack on TV. Watching Jon throw a burger onto a griddle is like watching an ape play disc golf. But on the day before the bar is supposed to get renovated, (the day after a perpetually failed stress test, more on that later). Jon has all of the memorabilia moved out of the bar. All of it. There’s an entire flea market’s worth of crap in the parking lot of Dimples. Sal looks at this with the horror you approach a home flood with. The group goes inside and the bar looks infinitely better, inviting even. But looking at his face, you know he’s going to drag every last bit of memorabilia back in there. As of today, Dimples is closed. 

Between the pig-headedness of Sal and the surefootedness of Jon, there’s an approach that would satisfy both Sal and Jon. Jon’s approach alienates the business owner, and usually leaves the bar looking where a Sim would go on a date. Jon has only one way he can understand a bar, and it’s as something that makes the most money possible. There’s no room for quirk or community. Jon’s ideal bar is closer to a theme park tavern. And when it’s all done, Taffer hits the road, whistling a tune, looking for another dream to shatter. 

This illustrates two things. 

The first is the pattern of Jon coming in and rearranging the business tells us something in this eon of equity groups and consultants and corporate raiders. It would not be impossible to fix a bar over time: get management to hold people accountable for their responsibilities, clearly delineating those responsibilities, figuring out how to efficiently pour drinks, tightening the ship, and making it clear that for the business to work, we have to have some responsibility here, and the day is here. Even ignoring any sort of moral or political dimension to working, team work is absolutely necessary for any project, and that means responsibility to the person working next to you. And when people view the business they work at as their “team”, they tend to work better. That’s an entire argument for the dream of business unionism and the arrangements you see in the Scandinavian social democracies: everyone has some degree of control and understanding, but the ability to negotiate conditions. 

But what Jon does instead is something akin to shock therapy. There is the initial arrival, there is the pow-wow where he yells at the owner and tells them how things are going to go. There is an immediate demand for the bar to be cleaned, pulling an all-nighter. In the fiction of the show, they’re back the next day to talk about the changes they need, with little sleep. Specialists train people in the economy, condescending to them, turning every beer and shot man into a blackshirted cocktail maker (if there’s any defensible part of the show, watching people be taught how to cook and the menu revamps are probably better than letting the kitchen serve the way almost all of them do). There is the stress test, where Jon creates an artificial situation of a busy night by bringing in more customers than the bar usually has to test out the staff’s skills. But if you look at the real purpose: it’s to show they will work without issue under the new regime. It doesn’t matter if the best way for bad service is to overwhelm your staff, because for the economic rearrangement of the bar to stand, some things will have to be broken. In a way, we can understand IMF debt restructurings through the primordial open mouth of Jon Taffer: there is only the profit motive.  

The second, and final thing: I have loved many bars where Jon Taffer’s belief in how a business should work would destroy everything, including the overall ambience of that bar. What’s more important for a bar than delivering deliverables should be a sense of hospitality, something that you get from the neighborhood that’s different than what you could have gotten anywhere else, a sense of history of where we are. Jon’s overall mission delivers efficiency, but it also is another wave of gentrification oftentimes getting so far from the original mission of the bar that you can’t go back. Everyone loves dive bars until you get a bad grilled cheese from the kitchen, but dive bars represent something different. William Faulkner said civilization begins with distillation, and throughout European and American history, the public house has been where democracy begins to foment. Jon represents something different: the drive to commodify people going out. That is something else entirely, and following its logic to its furthest extent doesn’t get you the public house. What it gets you is Chick-Fil-A, where every employee acts like if they get sprayed with water they’ll short circuit. We are acutely aware of losing our third places, and it’s that accelerating drive for everything to be perfect, no inconveniences, that has led to us selling public life down the river. Now we sit in our apartments, watching delivery apps, furious at every delay, never once thinking of what could be going on with the driver while thinking of ourselves that we want grace at our jobs. 

But jobs are not in the grace business. One day, they will send a Jon Taffer here to straighten all of us out.