Robert Irvine’s Restaurant: Impossible make-over at Bumbinos Italian Ristorante backfired and the restaurant closed down shortly after the episode aired.
Robert Irvine and his Restaurant: Impossible team often have to overhaul everything from the interior design to the management style of the restaurants that they visit in the show.
Bumbinos Italian Ristorante, the restaurant which Irvine transformed in 2014 was dissolved just months after the “Bummed Out” episode first aired.
All about Restaurant: Impossible
Restaurant: Impossible first started airing Food Network back in 2011 and eventually went on to air a total of 22 seasons, before being cancelled by the network in 2023.
The show follows chef and restaurateur, Robert Irvine, as he travels across the United States to visit a variety of struggling restaurants.
Irvine then uses his years of experience in the hospitality industry to observe and ultimately fix the most glaring issues at these restaurants before they end up having to close their doors.
Irvine and his team of talented designers, then get to work completely transforming these spaces within just two days, in the hopes that these changes and upgrades would usher in a new era.
An Update on Bumbinos Italian Ristorante from Restaurant: Impossible
There are very few reality television shows that are popular and successful enough to make it past the 100-episode mark.
Restaurant: Impossible celebrated reaching 100 episodes with Irvine and his team doing what they do best: helping a struggling business called Bumbinos Italian Ristorante in the “Bummed Out” episode, which aired on April 30, 2014.
Bumbinos Italian Ristorante, as its name suggests, is a restaurant specializing in Italian cuisine, which was located in Orange City, Florida.
The restaurant was owned by Terry Gardner and her son, Willie Fretwell, as a joint business-venture which would allow the duo to spend more time together.
However, when Bumbinos Italian Ristorante’s profits started taking a dive, Terry, Willie and their family-friend, Cappy (who all run the business together) stopped communicating with each other, almost completely.
To add insult to injury, the restaurant was also critically understaffed, with the wait staff often having to manage up to 20 customers at once.
Fortunately, Irvine and his team quickly got to work upgrading the restaurant and fixing the lingering communication issues. And by the end of the episode, Bumbinos Italian Ristorante hosted an extremely successful re-launch.
Unfortunately though, this success was incredibly short-lived, as Terry, Willie, Cappy, Bumbino (Talyor) and Laken shared a message on the Bumbinos Italian Ristorante Facebook page on 25 August 2014 announcing that the restaurant was closing down permanently.
What happened after the “Bummed Out” episode from Restaurant: Impossible?
In the end, Bumbinos Italian Ristorante ended up closing its doors just four short months after the “Bummed Out” episode first aired. Thus, there was not much time to see whether Irvine’s changes had made much of a difference at all.
But a follow-up article posted on the Food Network website did confirm that Bumbinos Italian Ristorante’s support had “increased approximately 35 percent” in the two weeks following this episode’s premiere and that customers loved all of the new interior design details.
What the Bumbinos Italian Ristorante reviews had to say
Although it was pretty evident that Irvine had gotten through to the Bumbinos Italian Ristorante owners by the end of the episode and that he had shown them how their arguing had made their customers uncomfortable, the reviews for the restaurant did not really improve all that much after his departure.
Before Bumbinos Italian Ristorante had closed down, the restaurant had a just-above-average rating of 2.9 out of 5 star rating on Yelp, from a total of 20 reviews. Just two of the reviews posted in 2014 gave the restaurant more than a one-star rating.
Why did Bumbinos Italian Ristorante close down?
The Facebook message in which Bumbinos Italian Ristorante’s owners announced the restaurant’s closure explained that many different factors had contributed to this difficult decision.
The message listed the failing economy, continued health problems and even the fact that the “Bummed Out” episode ended up “back firing” on the business, as contributing factors.
Although the Bumbinos Italian Ristorante did not provide an explanation of exactly how being on the show backfired on them, it is worth mentioning that the restaurant had urged its followers to tune in to watch a re-run of the Restaurant: Impossible episode just a few months before the closure announcement was posted.
So, it is entirely likely that the owners simply meant that they had not seen as much success from the show as they may have hoped to, and not that appearing on the show had led to the closure of the restaurant.
