What would you do if an ABC News hidden-camera show asked to stage scenarios at your business? For Fred and Lisa Giachetti, owner-operators of the winery and restaurant Del Vino Vineyards in Northport, you say yes — provided the producers of the moral-quandary series “What Would You Do?” not do controversy.
“We didn’t say yes immediately,” Lisa Giachetti recalls of the shoot that took place June 18 to 20 and which the vineyard revealed recently on social media, “because I wasn’t familiar with the show and I needed some information. We had quite a few Zoom calls to find out exactly how this was going to be executed.”
Hosted by John Quiñones, the series, which ran from 2009 to 2020 before returning for season 16 in February, records reactions from real people to staged scenarios often involving whether to intervene to help a stranger. The most recent episodes, which ran in April, included, per their loglines, “rude remote worker causes a scene in public,” “family’s struggle with dementia while dining out” and “couple’s open-marriage discussion catches bystanders’ attention.”
“I didn’t want to be put in a controversial situation or compromised,” Giachetti continues, giving as an example her objection to “having a manager or a pretend manager yell at a staff member.”
The producers obliged, and by the Giachettis’ account the cast and crew were model guests — although there were more of them than anticipated. “I thought they were going to come in with 10 or 12 people,” says Lisa Giachetti, chuckling. “They have a crew of 50 and an RV for [Quiñones] that’s 40 feet long!”
The production did its setup on June 18, she says, bringing in “these towers they strategically placed out on my patio with camouflaged cameras and lighting. It’s amazing. You would never know. And then there was shelving beneath it that we had to decorate to make it look like it was part of the decor.”
The show shot for two days beginning the following day — which the couple belatedly realized was Juneteenth, a national holiday.
“We were so busy that day,” Lisa Giachetti says. “And then our [electronic order-taking] point-of-service system went down! So I have 275 people seated and a 50-person crew trying to film, and I can’t communicate with my kitchen, I can’t close out credit cards. … We had to go old school.” Her young waitstaff — many of whom had never worked with pen and paper — had to write down orders and walk them to the kitchen.
Del Vino, which real estate attorney Fred Giachetti and his psychologist wife of 31 years opened to the public in November 2018, has indoor and outdoor dining, with a number of three-hour seatings daily. During the shoot, they placed the crew’s production base in an upstairs dining room. Quiñones monitored the action from a ground-floor anteroom before choosing the moment to step out and reveal a scenario was staged.
Most of the diners enjoyed the experience, Lisa Giachetti said, except for “a few, very few, people who said it was intrusive. ABC was wonderful — they comped them immediately. It wasn’t like, ‘Well, you’ll be receiving a check in a week.’ Immediately.”
The series is in production for season 17. ABC has announced no airdate or time frame.
The vineyard previously was a location for the 2021 streaming/video-on-demand rom-com “The Maltese Christmas.”
