Maybe the dentist is having a mid-life crisis. He figures the Bogie act
will help pull the kind of chicks he could never get when he was yanking
molars and scraping plaque. You see a lot of this ailment—perfectly
reasonable, even shrewd businessmen, hitting their fifties, suddenly
writing checks with their cock. And they are not entirely misguided in
this; they probably will get laid. The restaurant business does have
somewhat relaxed mores about casual sex, and there are a number of
amiably round-heeled waitresses, most of them hopelessly untalented
aspiring actresses for whom sexual congress with older, less attractive
guys is not entirely unfamiliar.
Unsurprisingly, a retired dentist who starts a restaurant for the sex, or to
be told he's marvelous, is totally unprepared for the realities of the
business. He's completely blindsided when the place doesn't start making
money immediately. Under-capitalized, uneducated about the arcane
requirements of new grease traps, frequent refrigeration repairs,
unforeseen equipment replacement, when business drops, or fails to
improve, he panics, starts looking for the quick fix. He thrashes around
in an escalating state of agitation, tinkering with concept, menu, various
marketing schemes. As the end draws near, these ideas are replaced by
more immediately practical ones: close on Sundays . . . cut back staff . . .
shut down lunch. Naturally, as the operation becomes more
schizophrenic—one week French, one week Italian—as the poor
schmuck tries one thing after another like a rat trying to escape a burning
building, the already elusive dining public begins to detect the
unmistakable odor of uncertainty, fear and approaching death. And once
that distinctive reek begins to waft into the dining room, he may as well
lay out petri-dishes of anthrax spores as bar snacks, because there is no
way the joint is gonna bounce back. It's remarkable how long some of
these neophytes hang on after the clouds of doom gather around the
place, paying for deliveries COD as if magic will happen—one good
weekend, a good review, something will somehow save them.
Like some unseen incubus, this evil cloud of failure can hang over a