Tonight, CHEF WANTED WITH ANNE BURRELL returns with its Season 3 premiere at 10pm ET/PT on Food Network, and for the second straight season one of the show's featured restaurants has closed its doors before viewers can see which chef wins that restaurant's competition. Is this just business as usual in the restaurant industry or is CHEF WANTED spoiling the broth?

Don't worry, Anne hasn't lost her magic touch.
 

While filming Season 2, Anne visited the Sea Dog Steak & Ale (Northborough, MA) and helped choose its new head chef in the middle of September 2012. Only three months later, the eatery abruptly shut down its grills well before it could get the Food Network bump in customers following its mid-February 2013, small-screen debut.

We won't spoil details about Season 3, but we will tell you that one of the new season's ten restaurants just emptied its fryers this past Sunday -- only four days before the new season debuted.

Plus, two other restaurants -- Season 2's Mirabelle (Los Angeles) and the series premiere's Mucho Ultima Mexicana (Los Angeles) -- folded within six months of their first television appearances.

That's four failures for a TV series with a relatively short run, which, on the surface, seems like a lot. It's not close to the 90% first-year failure rate (erroneously) touted by Rocco DiSpirito on NBC's THE RESTAURANT in 2003, but four restaurant failures in only 29 episodes did make me wonder; so I evaluated all 29 restaurants in three seasons of CHEF WANTED, and assembled information about whether the featured eateries are now closed or still serving customers and how long each diner has kept its doors open.

What are typical failure rates for restaurants? From "Why Restaurants Fail," we learn that 26% fail in the first year, 19% close their doors in the second year, and another 14% shut down in their 3rd year. An earlier study from Cornell revealed that 70% of restaurants close within ten years, which means 11% of restaurants disappear sometime between their 4th and 10th years.

Now, with a heaping tablespoon of real data and a little dash of statistics, we can test whether CHEF WANTED restaurants fail at a greater rate than a typical eatery. [I'll spare you the math, but if you really want to talk about chi-square distributions, email me.]

The result? There is no statistical difference (at a significance level of 0.05) between a typical restaurant and an eatery that appears on CHEF WANTED, which is really quite amazing. CHEF WANTED restaurants, which aren't always in the best shape when Anne arrives, should probably fail much faster than other establishments -- but they don't.

Even though Anne isn't able to make changes to management, location, marketing or menu at these fine-dining restaurants, she still gives them a fighting chance with new chefs. Imagine what she could do if she had more control.