Shareen Campbell and Phil Saunter, owners of Los Gatos and Bistro Les Chats in Wood Street, and the Swindon Business People of the Year, talk about life in the restaurant business One of our restaurants is closed this week, so we spent an evening watching porn. And by that we mean, more TV about food!

I don’t know if it’s an apocryphal statistic, but apparently the average Briton spends more time watching food on TV than cooking it. Not if you run a restaurant, you don’t!

We’ve been watching The Restaurant Man. The series follows Russell Norman, a successful London restaurateur, helping amateurs to open their first restaurant. It brings back a lot of memories for us.

They all make basic mistakes – unrealistic business plans, no plans at all, prices too high, prices too low, menu or style of service not thought through, confusion about staff roles, the list goes on. We watch, cringe, laugh and acknowledge that we made all the mistakes that all of the people made combined, and some more, and we still survived!

Does that mean we think it’s easy to make the transition from foodie to restaurateur? No. It’s very hard work. But TV can help. In the early UK series (2004,) Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares used to be genuinely analytical of a restaurant’s problems and constructive in discussion of ways to improve.

Raymond Blanc’s competitive series, The Restaurant, gave insight and real opportunities to couples to test and develop their ideas, and was produced in an informative way to begin with. Sadly, as these series get larger audiences, they seem to degenerate into populist exercises in ritual humiliation.

It would be humiliating and frustrating to pursue your dream, with a mission to bring your personal style of food and service to the public, only for them to question or even reject it. But however much it’s rooted in passion, it’s business. You either adapt to your market, find the market that wants you, or give up. One of the things we know now is how lucky we were that the Swindon public welcomed us, gave us a chance to work out what we were doing, and helped us to succeed.

Swindon needs more good independent places to eat. So if you have a dream – don’t just watch the food porn, get out there and do it!