Another exciting episode of this compelling series. This time it was the Challenge day in which couples are given a task and pick of their team from other competitors. This time there were three couples battling it out: Richard and Scott, Michele and Russell and father and daughter couple Harriet and Mike.

Their challenge was to create a menu for a motorway service station and market their restaurant. One of them would lose and their restaurant would be closed.

As usual, the money brought in is not the only factor in Raymond’s decision who will stay and who shall go. Especially at this stage of the competition, it is more important for him to keep people who have right attitude and drive than just those who just makes most money but don’t really show the will to win.

So the couples were off to do their market-research, plan their menus and marketing campaign. One of their responsibilities was to take the photos of their meals and submit them to printers who would then provide advertising boards showing off the dishes on offer and hopefully make the customers to buy them. Harriet and Mike accepted ill-advice from their team member with previous experience of marketing who told them that when the photos of dishes are taken, no meal is actually ever cooked but they are constructed from ready-meals and any available props, e.g. a small cardboard box under pile of mash and steaks made of paper and coloured to look real. Unfortunately, for Harriet and Mike, this practise is illegal in the UK.

While Harriet and Mike were unknowingly breaking the law, Michele and Russell didn’t get started preparing the meals for pictures until forty minutes before the submission deadline.  Not so surprisingly they didn’t manage to prepare and photograph all dishes on time and had to settle for three meals only leaving two without picture. The drama didn’t stop to the sample meals and photographs. Richard and Scott got their done on time but on the evening before the opening, Scott got stomach pain and started vomiting. That left Richard alone to take care of everything on the challenge day. Was it nerves that brought Scott down or was it something else? Who knows.

On the competition day the couples did all they could to drive in customers and make sales. So much so that Richard forgot their dessert cake in the oven and when he finally remembered it, it was burnt. Not that it really mattered since no one ordered it. Healthy fish cakes for children that Harriet had on the menu ended up deep-fried fish cakes tasting terrible because she didn’t get the mixture right and ran out of time to prepare them.  Russell prepared excellent dishes presented impeccably, shame that no one knew about them since they didn’t get their advertising photos taken on time. To compensate the lack of proper promotional material, they hand wrote placards.

Finally the day drew to end and restaurants were closed. The all important take-ins were counted and each restaurant’s performance was calculated as a market share from the total takings. The teams’ performances are evaluated as whole so the money is not the only factor in deciding who stays and who goes. After an agonising night for the participants, the decision day was upon them.

During the performance review, the couples have chance to explain and defend their decisions they made and bring forward their reasons why Raymond should keep their restaurants open. The grilling from Raymond may seem harsh on occasion but all he really asks are facts and all he really wants to see is the passion and honesty. Very often the couples seem to forget that everything they do is filmed and everything inspectors see is written down so you would expect to realise that there is no point in trying to change the facts in the review. This time it was Michelle and Russell who thought they could talk their way out of it, claiming that they did do their best to get the photographs taken for the menu but simply didn’t have enough time. Good reason though it could have been, there was just one small problem: other couples had just as much time to get theirs done and they managed to do them.

So, whose restaurant saw its last day in life? [1] Watch the episode yourself!