Soul Daddy: Why It Failed

By Elina Shatkin Tue., Jul. 5 2011 at 2:15 PM

Soul Daddy in Los Angeles at the Hollywood & Highland mall.

Soul Daddy arrived on the American fast casual dining scene the same way the reality show responsible for its existence arrived on television: haltingly, half-heartedly, with no panache and no clear vision.

Soul Daddy, which in May "won" America's Next Great Restaurant (perhaps the most bloodless reality show since CSPAN's broadcast of the HUD confirmation hearings), went on to open three outposts (one each in LA, NY and Minneapolis). Last week, Soul Daddy suddenly and "unexpectedly" closed. Unexpected if you had never watched the show or eaten at the restaurant. Totally predictable if you had.

The fiasco wasn't cheap. Based on SEC filings, Portfolio estimates the failure cost about $3 million. For Chipotle founder Steve Ells and his fellow judges/investors Bobby Flay, Lorena Garcia and Curtis Stone (each of whom reportedly invested $220,000), that's a big bruise, both for their wallets and their egos. What went wrong?

Location, Location, Location: We can't speak for the New York or Minneapolis locations, but in LA they launched Soul Daddy in Hollywood & Highland, a tourist-driven mall with such a dearth of decent eateries that a strawberry-scented lip gloss at Sephora seems more appealing than than most of the food on offer. (Note: We love Beard Papa's and have yet to try Boho in its new incarnation.) It should have been an easy win. Instead, they buried Soul Daddy on the fourth floor in a back corner of the mall with little foot traffic. We had trouble finding it, and we were actually looking. We can't imagine anyone stumbling on it if they weren't.

Concept Drain: Detroit caterer Jamawn Woods came in with a good concept: fried chicken and waffles. Here in LA, home of Roscoe's Chicken N' Waffle's, that notion is hardly revolutionary, but in much of the country, that would be unique. It certainly could have been edible. Instead, over the course of the show, Woods' concept was hamfistedly reworked and "improved" by "experts," until the original idea of fried chicken and waffles morphed into "healthy soul food."

The TV Show: In the same way that American Idol is essentially an extended, episodic commercial for the winner's eventual album, America's Next Great Restaurant needed to be an exciting, catchy TV show that would generate interest in a new restaurant. If you watched the first episode of America's Next Great Restaurant, you know that many of the most intriguing and original concepts were weeded out before the final 10. Boring concepts, boring participants, boring challenges, boring judges. Everything about this TV show played it safe. The ratings were deservedly mediocre, and when Soul Daddy won, nobody cared.

Steve Ells: The guy is a bona fide whiz with burritos and has successfully steered Chipotle through its massive expansion and recent rebranding, but he has no Midas touch when it comes to the fast-casual dining sector. (Let's see how his ShopHouse Southeast Asian concept does.) It doesn't help that Ells is as untelegenic as a human can be. Onscreen, he has no personality. He's as dull as dry toast. Maybe it was hubris, maybe it was stupidity. Either way, Ells et. al killed everything that was good about Woods' original concept. It's like a Hollywood exec reading your screenplay, telling you the studio loves it and now, could you just change everything about it?

The Food: Whatever else you want to say about the strength of the restaurant industry in general or the fast-casual sector in specific, a restaurant's appeal ultimately comes down to its food (and its price-point). The food at Soul Daddy was awful.

The fried chicken of Woods' original vision was dull and dry, more expensive and much less flavorful than the chicken at El Pollo Loco (which is having its own struggles competing with other grilled chicken chains). The fluffy waffles Woods' had envisioned were hard, dry, tiny discs that tasted like cornmeal congealed with Elmer's glue. The side dishes all tasted bland and, inexplicably, they were often served cold or lukewarm. It's not that "healthy" and "soul food" are incompatible, it's just that the food at Soul Daddy was neither, demonstrating the adage: when you try too hard to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.

Location Info

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Soul Daddy

6801 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA

Category: Restaurant

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Tags:

America's Next Grea Restaurant, Bobby Flay, Curtis Stone, Elina Shatkin, Fast Casual, Fast Food, Jamawn Woods, Lorena Garcia, Reality TV, Soul Daddy, Steve Ells, Television

We Recommend

Carberam

Judges should have picked "Meltworks" or "Spice Coast"

Shawngeorge33

The MOA location was indeed terrible! It was on a poorly lit hallway, sandwiched between multiple sit-down restaurants. NO fast food/ fast casual restaurant would do well there because typically the people who go down that hall are either: In a hurry to get to their next destination, or checking out the sit down restaurants to find their next meal.

Cdsiii

FYI - Noodles & Chipotle kick a$$ in that very same MOA location.

Bottom line with Soul Daddy at MOA:

conceptually -> fast casual soul food is too polarizing....especially in MNexecutionally -> the food was just NOT good....not good AT ALL

ZxGriffin

Fast Food Indian... Dumb dumb investors.... these guys are professionals? Fail

Marco Vandegraaf

lets face it Soul Daddy Closed because Bobby Flay cant really cook Chipotle founder just did what every burrito restaurant around a college campus did and the other two "backers" are just face meat for the media. I wouldn't have any of them touch a restaurant of mine unless they were silent partners

Guest

Steve Ells really surprised me with his bad advice. Kept telling the contestants to do stuff he never did. I'm convinced, no one knows nothing. There are variables that never get discovered, and managers take credit for stuff that happens accidentally.

freedml

I think that Soul Daddy probably got the space for 'free' in exchange for weekly plugs on the TV show, and therefore got space nobody wanted for good reason.

I disagree with the food review -- the day I was there (after stumbling around H&H) the food was good. I was planning to take my family there the next time we visit H&H (which is rare). But a 'tourist mall' is no place to start and keep a 'following.'

Symphx

they castrated the dude as they did vic vegas in next food network star...they turn them into blabbering crying women; let these guys be who they are and quit psychoanalyzing them or making their food into something it was not intended to be.

Apitts411

I am in total agreement in terms of the food and wrote the owners to offer constructive criticism. The NYC location wasn't well thought out either in terms of pedestrian or vehicle traffic volume. What a waste of a dream.Audrey

dflyswatter

We were taking bets when watching the show how long it would last. The only reason we watched the damn thing was that 2 of Ambers former bosses were the chefs on the show that were hired by the contestants. I do believe that Sould Daddy was her ex female boss. I'll check.

foodgps

You can probably add lack of promotion to the list of reasons for Soul Daddy's closure. I never even heard about the restaurant until after it was open, and I'm sure that's true for a lot of people. There was zero anticipation. Then again, if the owners weren't interested in seeing the restaurant survive, why sink time and dollars into promotion?

Bedford Crenshaw

From what I've seen, the MOA location was also bad. It was right next to a Tony Roma's and on the other side a few stores down was a Famous Dave's.

freedml

Tony Romas and Famous Daves are sit-down, $$ restaurants. Soul Daddy was casual fast dining and $. Could have survived there.

Jennifer

I knew from the very first episode that aired Soul Daddy would be a complete disaster. It should have been eliminted in the first round of competition. I don't feel sorry for the investors. They have only themselves to blame for making such a lousy decision. Too bad the rest of the American public has to suffer from their consequences. There were other exciting concepts brought to the table that could have easily done well.

Tfresca

Doesn't the fact that all these restaurants closed in like a month mean that this was all some sort of contractual obligation and nothing more? No restaurant makes money in a month or sometimes even 6 months. The fact that they closed them all in a month means they were never committed to it in the first place. They should be ashamed for dashing this guy's dreams in such a cavalier way.

Elina Shatkin

You may be right about that, but it since the judges actually put up their own money, it seems strange that they wouldn't care if the restaurant succeeded. I'm unclear how the financials work on the back-end, but perhaps Chipotle is repaying the judges for their investment. That would lend credence to your theory.

Guest

For $200k each, they got 3-4 months of advertising. Maybe that's all they were after in the first place.

Marco Vandegraaf

in America its much better to fail than iot is to make it tax writeoffs you know

AmyBethGoldman

The New York location was also awful.

Rcrutche

I was annoyed by the politically-correct need to make everything "healthy" and I think that might be one of the reasons the restaurant failed. I get that this is TV and the producers felt the need to bully America into doing what's good for them, but when it comes down to it Americans are going to spend their money on what tastes good and what they like, which just generally is not healthy food. You can love that fact or hate it, but you can't try to ignore and then complain when the people don't come.

Chuck Duncan

Instead of going with a concept that (1) already existed and (2) stripping it of everything that made it good, they should have been willing to think outside the box, so to speak. I would have been much more interested in eating at Tiffin Box (a much better name than the one they forced on him), even with the stupid changes they "suggested." Seriously, does everything need to be a sandwich???

Mistah Kurtz

"the most bloodless reality show since CSPAN's broadcast of the HUD confirmation hearings"

Former huckster HUDster Andrew Cuomo has his people talking him up as a replacement for unruly Joe Biden. Maybe Cuomo's girlfriend Sandra Lee will eventually be the first First Lady to alienate everybody. Does that dreadful possibility explain why you're spending so many pixels on some failed TV restaurant no one cares about? If not, my question after the jump.

Wuz up?