Crescendo Restaurant

> "*Get busy cooking or..."
> "Get busy collecting unemployment.*"
> ― Liz and her employees after she explains a plan
>
>

**Crescendo Restaurant** is Liz restaraunt but it was sabotaged by Nick Franzelli.

## Biography

### Season 1

#### “The Catfish”

Liz discusses what food the restaurant is going to be cooking. After she finishes, Nick enters the kitchen and offers her assistance. Liz says that she is too busy to be watching over Nick. Nick proves herself to be very useful, and eventually, Liz decides that Nick should work at the restaurant every day after school.

#### “The Pig in a Poke”

Over the phone, Liz’s accountant tells her that business was off 9% last month. Afterwards, Liz asks her family for ideas that could help attract new customers and increase sales.

In the restaurant, Eduardo complains about the puttanesca’s anchovy paste due to the belief that anchovy may overpower the sauce. Liz tells him to just cook it the way the recipe says. Nick gets offended over what Eduardo did and rants to Liz about how males tend to get all the attention and that females should be treated the same as anyone. Liz agrees. Liz then reveals that if she wins *Top Chef*, she plans on raising her profile and taking her restaurant national.

Shortly afterwards, Nick finds out from Liz that the restaurant has wine bottles worth hundreds of dollars. This gives Nick the idea that the restaurant should have a wine tasting weekend. Liz doesn’t agree with it at first. Nick is able to convince her by saying that the event would be interesting, and since it would only occur on one night, people wouldn’t want to miss it. She also adds that the high-end wines can also be a way to get people to discover Liz’s cooking, making them become regular customers. Liz approves of Nick’s idea and starts thinking about what foods to make.

Nick wants Molly to promote the wine tasting event. Molly is reluctant at first since it is off-brand for her. Nick convinces her to do a blast about the event. The idea gets full reservation in Crescendo with the help of Molly’s social media recommendation. Some people even want another wine tasting event. Nick suggests Ed to go to the event to support Liz.

At the event, Nick has the wine pairing menu and stays inside of the wine storage room to get bottles ready for each course. Ed is the one who gets the wine from Nick in order to give to Liz.

The wine tasting turns out to be a success. Back in Thompson household, Liz reveals that she took a wine bottle from the restaurant. As she lifts the bottle, the label falls off. Unbeknownst to them, during the wine tasting event, Nick played a scam with pasting labels of the expensive wine on cheap wine bottles.

After the label falls off, Liz angrily points out that the new distributor she has been using may have been selling her counterfeit wine bottles.

When someone from the restaurant calls her, she finds out that the restaurant is booked for two months and that they sold over $8,000 dollars of wine.

She ignores the fact that the label fell off the wine bottle she was going to use, because “as far as we know, it was a bad bottle.”

## Menu

These are the lists of food and drinks that have been mentioned throughout the course of the show.

### Food

* Orecchiette with a pork fennel sausage
* Brown-sugar ricotta and egg raviolo
	+ This was a special.
* Cannelloni
* Puttanesca
* Eggplant rollatini, stuffed with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes
* Risotto
* Swordfish carpaccio
* Fusion cuisine with an otoro
* Bowtie Pasta

### Wine

* Costa Nord
	+ At the wine tasting event, this is paired with the risotto.
* Vinietto Ricardo

## Trivia

* There are no salt and pepper shakers at tables, because according to Liz, the “dishes are already perfectly seasoned.” (“The Pig in a Poke”)
* A man once paid $30 for spaghetti, which Nick found to be weird. (“The Money-Box Scheme”)
* The Thompsons’ actions while trying to make Crescendo successful were revealed to be the reason the reason they inadvertently ruined Nick’s life.