Ty Watches "Bar Rescue": Paddy's Pub Edition

Jon Taffer and crew were back this past Sunday with an all new episode of "Bar Rescue". In this one they traveled to a bar, I kid you not, in Nevada called Paddy's Pub. I even asked my wife if I heard the name right. I was so hoping to find 4 owners hanging around a wild old man. Unfortunately it was not the same Paddy's Pub from "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia". Plus it was to in Philadelphia

So what was the problem with Paddy's? This bar was in Nevada. Strike one. This bar was also owned by an older woman named Pat, and Paddy was a nickname. Strike two. She also was super old, but not very weird. Swing and a miss, strike three. She was more like Pauly Shore's mom, Mitsy. Mitsy is famous for being a hardass owner of the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. Paddy, while not as menacing, was still in total control, even though she couldn't move around without a walker, and she was as hard on the employees, and her son, the new manager, as Mitsy was on up and coming comedians. Her son also had some kind of disease where he was going to be completely blind in a few short years, and this disease also made him suffer with a stutter. He was a mess. Needless to say, the staff did not respect him, so Paddy hung out there all the time. While the employees may have taken Paddy's verbal abuse, they weren't all that scared of her. As I said, she was very elderly, so the staff, especially the younger ones, did whatever they pleased. Paddy's son, even with his illness, was a total pushover. He let these employees walk all over him, and they fully took advantage of his poor eye sight, sneaking drinks whenever possible.

At one point in the beginning of the episode, one of the bartenders, Joy I believe her name was, comes stumbling in from outside, goes to the back to lay down and then proceeds to vomit. Mind you, she was on the clock the whole time. She was getting paid to get so wasted that she could barely walk, or even really function. She was a mess. The other staff, mainly Tawna, seemed to be legitimately good at their jobs, but they just stopped caring. This bar also had an enormous kitchen that wasn't used for cooking, but rather for storage.

Our hero Jon Taffer and his team, as they watched from the van on the TV screen in the van, said all their usual stuff. The staff was poor, this bar needed the kitchen, the son cannot run things properly, Paddy shouldn't be there, all the cliché stuff they do on "Bar Rescue". Taffer walked in after the whole Joy situation, and immediately went to Paddy. She gave him a big hug and he went into how moved he was by her letter. That's right, Paddy hand wrote a letter as opposed to using social media or email to get "Bar Rescue" to come. I LOVED this. Some things will never die. Anyway, Taffer called the son over and read the letter to him, and man did his mom beat the hell out of him with words. She called him anything and everything that Taffer would have called him had Paddy not been there. The son, of course, disagreed.

Now that the letter reading was over, they went directly into stress test the next day because the son wanted to show his mom that he wasn't a complete waste as a bar manager. They also reopened the kitchen to attract more customers to the bar. While the new drinks they wanted to try at stress test seemed pretty easy, the food, my five year old could have made. They were literally doing hot ham and cheese and hot turkey sandwiches. It was almost too easy.

Don't worry, the stress test was a disaster, as usual. The bar only had one speed well, so while the staff was doing their best, they kept bumping into each other. This caused drinks to be rushed which led to messed up or spilled drinks. The kitchen staff, while they did fine making sandwiches, kept getting confused by tickets, or lack thereof. The son was a nightmare. He had no tickets. He needed people to point out customers, he was all over the place.

The next day they regrouped and tried to figure everything out, but not before Paddy gave each of them a brutal tongue lashing. She pointed out each and everyone's faults that she saw at the stress test. It was rough. So while they all got retrained, learned the new menu and trained the new staff, Taffer and crew went to fix up the bar.

After a day or two everyone gathered for the big reopening, "Bar Rescue's" signature move. Taffer renamed the bar Pat's, in honor of the mom. The inside of the bar looked ridiculous. It looked like the waiting room of a not so fancy hotel. There were tacky trees and odd, almost old folks home style wall paper everywhere. They did give them an extra speed well and a new POS system, as is Taffer's way. Of course they crushed the re launch. Drinks and food were fast and correct. Even the son was finding people with ease and getting food and drinks to the proper people. They did so well, Paddy couldn't say one bad thing. She gave Taffer a big hug and while he was on his way out, he gave a creepy, longingly stare at Pat's Bar before getting in his car.

The 6 week checkup informed us that food and drink sales have gone up, but it also said that Joy was let go. I assumed she must have showed up drunk again because Paddy said she was going to be gone if she did it one more time. This was a very middle of the plate episode. It followed all the typical beats and rhythms of most "Bar Rescue" episodes. Come back next week for my review of the next new episode.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast. He spent the whole episode looking for loose rats around Paddy's Pub. Not one rat was seen, someone was doing their Charlie work.

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