Biting off more than what’s chewable is not uncommon with food-centric business projects. Today the folks likely reaching for the proverbial Pepto-Bismol are the quartet of judge-investors from NBC’s America’s Next Great Restaurant, whose grand experiment of launching a new dining chain ended up an unmitigated disaster.

ANGR, which debuted earlier this year to good reviews but poor ratings, was a mix between a food show and a reality competition. Ten hopefuls pitched their restaurant concepts to a panel of four culinary pros—host and chef-owner Bobby Flay, Chipotle founder Steve Ells, and chefs Lorena Garcia and Curtis Stone—with the grand prize being financial backing for the winner’s idea and the opening of three restaurants in three cities.

In the end, victory went to Jamawn Woods, a self-employed caterer from Detroit, who developed a soul-food dining concept called Soul Daddy. The investors promised him restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, and at the Mall of America in Minnesota. The restaurants opened the first week of May to a big PR splash, but less than seven weeks later, they’re all gone.

Talk about fast food.

On June 14, ANGR Holdings, the parent company of Soul Daddy Restaurants, announced the closing of Soul Daddy’s operations on the two coasts. This Wednesday, it confirmed the closing of the Minneapolis location.

The most recent statement read: “This was a difficult decision for us, as we wanted to see Soul Daddy succeed, but the restaurant simply was not performing as we had hoped. We'd like to thank all of the customers who tried our restaurants and the people who worked hard to try to make the restaurants succeed.”

The judge-investors’ catch phrase in dismissing the eliminated participants—the gravely delivered "We will not be investing in your restaurant"—may now come back to haunt them. In shutting down all three sites of the enterprise they'd deemed most worthy and viable, the judges have trumpeted their own failure as venture capitalists, ineptitude as business owners, and perhaps even heartlessness as overseers. Woods, for example, reportedly only learned about the closing of the East and West Coast Soul Daddys through an email, according to a post in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Because no investors would typically shutter an enterprise that’s raking in dough, what went wrong? Neither Flay, Ells, Garcia, nor Stone responded to requests for comments, and ANGR Holdings’ publicity arm declined to provide access to Woods.

Without knowing all the behind-the-scene details and exactly how much money the investors ponied up (even when the show aired, none of the four judges nor NBC would go into those kind of specifics), several experts boiled down the fiasco to four key ingredients.

Multisite cross-country launch: Because a manager-and-owner presence is a key reason why restaurants succeed, launching three restaurants simultaneously in different parts of the United States is not a good first step, says Mat Mandeltort, a a senior consultant at food-service consultancy Technomic. “If the guy whose baby this is can’t be at each place and see what’s happening on a day-to-day basis, especially early on, it can become a logistical nightmare. Open one first, and then get your systems down and find out where the cracks are in the foundation. Ask Krispy Kreme what happens if you overexpand and get ahead of yourself.”