Robert Irvine has a few different shows to his name, but Restaurant: Impossible is where
you probably heard of the celebrity chef first.
From the show's surprisingly low success rate to its unexpected devotion to realism, here
are the facts you never knew about Restaurant: Impossible.
If you know anything about the restaurant industry, you know that the series is called
Restaurant: Impossible for a reason.
Specifically, saving every restaurant that has problems from going under is a, well,
impossible task.
Sometimes, rehabilitating a restaurant with a bad reputation is just a losing prospect
professional help or not.
Episodes of the series showed Irvine and crew spending $10,000 in 48 hours to completely
revamp a failing restaurant.
The results always looked impressive, but more often than not, they didn't actually
work.
According to the reality food show tracker Food Network Gossip, over 100 locations that
Restaurant: Impossible visited subsequently closed, meaning whatever solutions Irvine
and company came up with often didn't work in the long run.
The 2011 premiere season really emphasized the "impossible" aspects of the series' mission:
all seven places the show visited in those episodes were out of business by 2015.
Restaurant: Impossible wasn't the first time Irvine put his culinary skills to work on
television.
Instead of revamping failing businesses, its predecessor Dinner: Impossible saw Irvine
and company challenging themselves to prepare large meals in unusual conditions with a strict
time limit.
The show got Irvine some attention, but it also brought him some unwelcome scrutiny.
Turns out, this know-it-all chef is a bit of a bald-faced liar.
"Nothing but drama!"
In a scandalous twist, Irvine got booted from the show after four seasons when his impressive
résumé proved too good to be true.
The St. Petersburg Times exposed some of the tall tales in Irvine's biography, with lies
and exaggerations including claims that he had cooked for three presidents, earned a
knighthood, and prepared a wedding cake for the British royal family.
Just like that, his Dinner was over, with Chef Michael Symon taking over for the show's
fifth season.
But as impossible as it sounds, Food Network actually brought Irvine back for the sixth
season thanks to his popularity with viewers, and he stayed with the series until its last
meal in 2010.
The following year, he pivoted to the spinoff series Restaurant: Impossible and continued
his climb toward foodie fame like nothing had ever happened.
Restaurant: Impossible ran from 2011 until 2016, counting up 160 episodes across 13 seasons.
The show came to an end despite good ratings, with Irvine announcing that he would be heading
to the CW to host his own talk show afterwards.
Instead of sticking to his usual schtick of food knowledge and physical fitness, Irvine
aimed for his self-titled show to focus on solving people's relationship problems with
steely glares and tough-love advice.
It turned out not to be the most winning recipe.
In 2018, the show was canceled after only two seasons.
"This is what I want to do right now….
AGGGGGGGGGH!"
In Restaurant: Impossible, the changes Irvine and crew made involved more than just knocking
down walls and cleaning dirty appliances.
After all, Irvine is a chef, and chefs cook meals.
Often, Irvine flexed his skillset by suggesting dishes for the restaurants sometimes rather
strongly.
But what happened to those recipes when the Restaurant: Impossible train pulled out of
town?
Turns out, Irvine's dishes didn't always find a permanent place on restaurant menus.
While some of Irvine's suggestions remained on menus for years after his show visited,
such as a rabbit dish you can find at St. Louis' Mama's On The Hill, other entrees haven't
been so lucky.
John Meglio of Meglio's Italian Grill told The New York Times in 2012 that his customers
actually preferred the frozen, pre-made pasta his restaurant offered as opposed to the fresh-made
variety that Irvine suggested they adopt.
It just goes to show that the customer is always right, even when they're really, really
wrong.
"It makes you want to vomit immediately."
Another restaurant, The Coach Lamp, received a visit from Irvine in 2013, getting a new
patio dining area and a number of other changes.
But by 2015 the owners had changed the name of the restaurant and revamped it again themselves.
As owner Bill Darling told Insider Louisville at the time,
"They didn't get it right.
It still didn't work… because I don't have any customers."
"I TOLD YOU!!!"
Everyone knows that reality shows aren't exactly, well, reality.
But what about Restaurant: Impossible?
According to behind the scenes accounts, Restaurant: Impossible was an unusually true-to-life reality
show, with the final results being fairly accurate to the real-life events that happened.
Reportedly, Irvine did his sit-down interviews with restaurant owners in one take, and when
he swooped through a kitchen telling people to hurry, he didn't do it again to get a perfect
camera angle.
What happened is what happened.
After the show was cancelled, producer Marc Summers made a comment to Reality Blurred,
saying,
“I like to think of RI as the only true reality show on TV.
Nothing was contrived.
What you saw is what you got.”
Like all reality shows, there were pros and cons to appearing on Restaurant: Impossible.
On the one hand, people got to be on television.
On the other, they had to stand there and take it while a yoked-out gym rat passed judgment
on their life's work.
Despite the investments the show made into its renovations, many guests on the show were
less than enthusiastic about what they had to go through, especially when they never
asked the show to stop in to begin with.
In later seasons, the show tried a few "ambush" style fixes, with the crew showing up on a
tip from a restaurant owner's friend or employee rather than a request for help from the owners
themselves.
It was an approach that seemed doomed to fail, and made for some of the most awkward moments
in the show's history, with the crew showing up to "fix" places that didn't always seem
to need the help.
On Restaurant: Impossible, fixing up businesses was really just the dressing.
The meat and potatoes of the show was its focus on real people.
Some restaurateurs who appeared on the show later noted how unprepared they were for the
focus it put on their personal lives.
Sarah Hummell, whose restaurant Sip Bistro appeared on the show in 2016, told the Charlotte
News & Observer that she was surprised by the amount of emotional strain the show involved,
with Irvine digging way deeper into her marriage and personal life than she'd anticipated.
She described the process as, quote, "going through the most intense psychological and
physical evaluation of your life, and then having this all be on national television."
According to Hummell, Irvine was surprisingly adept at turning conversations to more personal
topics, exploring emotional baggage instead of just the contents of the walk-in.
As she put it to the newspaper,
"There’s things from my childhood that I wouldn’t tell anybody, much less on national
television to Robert Irvine, but he is like the best shrink, psychiatrist that I’ve
ever heard of."
It's no wonder Irvine wanted his own talk show.
At his core, he doesn't want to fix meals or restaurants: this reality TV guru just
wants to fix people.