Ep 3. Getting a Leg Up

Getting a Leg Up is the third installment of Mystery Diners, Season 2. In this episode, expert food and beverage industry detective Charles Stiles and his team come to the aid of a restaurant owner named Jenna. Jenna owns a casual bar and grill with a theme of motorbikes and sports. The restaurant's profits have been drastically dwindling despite Jenna's efforts to save it. To make matters worse, Jenna suspects her head chef of stealing and selling the restaurant's secret recipe buffalo wings to a rival restaurant down the block.

To get to the bottom of Jenna's woes, Charles and his team of Mystery Diners go undercover as bikers. One of them takes on the role of a new bartender, while another pretends to be looking for a job as a cook's helper. The rest of the team are covering the restaurant floor, acting as customers to observe the restaurant's service and the behavior of its staff.

From the outset, Jenna's restaurant appears lively and cozy, packed with customers enjoying drinks and meals. However, as the Mystery Diners settle in, problems start to emerge. Firstly, the restaurant's bartender is caught selling a big mark-up on a bottle of wine to unsuspecting customers. The Mystery Diners also notice a lot of confusion among Jenna's staff, particularly with the waitresses who mix up orders, aren't attentive to customers' needs, and are prone to taking breaks during service. More surprisingly, they also catch one of the waitresses secretly taking photos of customers while on the job.

The chef, who Jenna suspects of theft, is caught on camera making his own version of the restaurant's top-selling buffalo wings recipe. As if that wasn't bad enough, the Mystery Diners witness the chef leaving the kitchen and turning up at the rival restaurant across the street, carrying a bag of wings. To prove their theory, one of the Mystery Diners enters the rival restaurant to find Jenna's wings on the menu.

With the Mystery Diners incriminating evidence, Jenna confronts her untrustworthy staff members. The chef admits to stealing the recipe, while the bartender insists he was only following orders from Jenna's manager. The waitress who was taking pictures explained she was "practicing for her modeling career," while the other waitress fessed up to being preoccupied with her phone during work. Jenna fires her staff members on the spot and hires new ones, bringing back confidence and trust to the restaurant.

Lessons learned from this episode are that theft among staff and bad service can bring a business down. Jenna's restaurant was failing due to her staff not following the protocol she had put in place to ensure excellent customer service. The bartender's mark-ups on drinks had also soured customers' experiences, which in turn contributed to the decline in profits. In the end, it's a familiar situation for many restaurant and cafe owners, like Jenna, where they must closely monitor their employees and hold them accountable to keep their businesses thriving.