Love Bites Café closed down before its Kitchen Nightmares episode even aired, but Tess and Chris may have plans for a different food truck adventure.
Love Bites Café is a quaint Saugerties-based healthy eatery which was featured in the most recent season of the rebooted Kitchen Nightmares.
This mainstay of the downtown New York restaurant scene found itself in dire need of Chef Gordon Ramsay’s expert intervention after its two high-school sweetheart co-owners, Christopher Keff’s and Tess Robinson’s constant bickering landed them in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
New plans for Love Bites Café
While most of the owners featured on Kitchen Nightmares end up looking like the villains once Ramsay starts unpacking what is really going on behind the kitchen doors, Tess has actually emerged as one of the show’s most sympathetic characters.
Not only did Tess reveal in this very emotional episode of Kitchen Nightmares that she had been diagnosed with a rare medical condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome – but it was later revealed that Ramsay’s intervention was entirely unnecessary, as Love Bites Café was sold before the episode even made it to air.
However, Tess has proven that she is resilient, and a recent comment on the Love Bites Café Facebook page reveals that she may even have plans to take this business on the road soon.
Hopefully this possible new ‘Love Bites Food Truck’ will be more successful than its first iteration – or else Ramsay may need to expand his repertoire to include ‘Food Truck Nightmares’ very soon.
Kitchen Nightmares season 8
It is always frustrating to watch Ramsay try his best to rescue a restaurant, only for that restaurant to close down before any of his changes could really make a difference.
But Love Bites Café is not the only restaurant that Ramsay set out to help in Kitchen Nightmares’ eighth season, and the season’s other episodes can be summarized as follows:
| Episode | Title | Initial air date |
| 1. | “Bel Aire” | September 25, 2023 |
| 2. | “Bask 46” | October 2, 2023 |
| 3. | “In the Drink” | October 9, 2023 |
| 4. | “Da Mimmo” | October 16, 2023 |
| 5. | “Juicy Box” | November 6, 2023 |
| 7. | “El Cantito” | November 20, 2023 |
| 8. | “South Brooklyn Foundry” | November 27, 2023 |
| 9. | “Max’s Bar & Grill” | December 4, 2023 |
| 10. | “Diwan” | December 4, 2023 |
About Tess’s condition
Like most medical conditions, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome describes a group of inherited conditions which mainly affect the structure and function of connective tissues within the body.
The condition affects different people in different ways, but some of the most common symptoms include overly-flexible joints, stretchy skin, fragile skin, ruptured blood vessels in the walls of the intestines or the uterus, bruising and fatigue.
In Tess’s case, she has had about 25 surgeries for this condition, and in 2019 she told the Hudson Valley One that she had even been placed on a feeding tube before she was able to “heal [her] digestive system through thoughtful eating”.
It is exactly Tess’s passion for healthy eating and nutrition that kickstarted the journey to her opening Love Bites Café in the first place.
Are Tess and Chris still together?
Tess has not updated her Facebook profile since 2021, so it is difficult to tell what she has been up to since the “Love Bites” episode of Kitchen Nightmares first aired.
However, since the Love Bites Café Facebook page confirmed that there might be plans to re-launch the business in 2024 (and Tess and Chris are both partners in the business), it is fair to assume that they are still together.
Chris’s Facebook page also still lists that he is engaged to Tess. But since the couple has been in a relationship since 2015, there is likely no rush for these two lovebirds to tie the knot.
What happened to Love Bites Café?
Kitchen Nightmares has never really had the best track record with keeping its failing restaurants operational, even with Ramsay’s expert advice and interventions.
However, it is very rare for the restaurants that are featured on the show to close down before they can even bask in the Kitchen Nightmares glory.
Unfortunately for Love Bites Café and its two owners, Tess and Chris took to the business’s social media pages on July 9, 2023 to confirm that the business would be “transitioning ownership in the near future” (though if you believe the internet rumors, the business had already been sold before Ramsay and the Kitchen Nightmares crew arrived to film a month before).
The new restaurant that opened in Love Bites Café’s place is called ‘The Town Café’. The Town Café is family-owned and operated and has already been receiving great reviews from the Saugerties locals.
