
During last night's second season premiere of
'Tabatha's Salon Takeover,' the staff at a Chicago hair salon stood motionless and mostly dumbstruck as Tabatha Coffey forced their boss to pour $50 worth of hair products down the drain -- literally. Soon, the staff shed tears when, under Coffey's direction, they had to move a bunch of junk from the salon's basement to the home of Orbit Salon owner Eddie Cheung, an avowed "product junkie." By then, they knew that Tabatha had officially taken over.
Cast in the mold of Fox's Gordon Ramsay series, 'Kitchen Nightmares,' 'Tabatha's Salon Takeover' posits Coffey as a drill sergeant disciplinarian whose main goal is to chastise, reprimand and tell it like it is (brutally, of course).
Yet a visit to Coffey's own salon, Industrie Hair Gurus, yields a much different picture. Inside her Ridgewood, New Jersey locale, Coffey appears warm, approachable and miles away from the hard-driving persona hyped up on the show. The only request she makes of her staff is a reasonable one -- to cut a pesky tag off the back of her shirt as she snips and combs. "I'm tough, I'm talented, I'm taking over," says a stone-faced Coffey at the beginning of each episode.