Fiesta Sunrise, from the second season of Kitchen Nightmares, has been shrouded in mystery ever since the restaurant closed down – and so has its owners.
Now that the newly-rebooted eighth season of Kitchen Nightmares is in full swing, many longtime fans of the show have found themselves wondering what happened to the restaurants and owners profiled in their favorite episodes from the show’s first pre-revival seasons.
The only problem is that season one to seven of Kitchen Nightmares aired from 2007 to 2014.
And many of the owners and the restaurants that took center stage back then have fallen into obscurity as the publicity around being featured on the show died down.
This is especially true for restaurants like Fiesta Sunrise, which, along with its owners Vic, Patti and Yolanda, were featured in the second season of the show back in 2008. The eatery closed down before the episode was even aired.
What Vic and Yolanda are doing now
This failing Mexican restaurant made waves when this episode first aired, mostly due to the fact that Vic and Yolanda plunged their daughter (Vic’s stepdaughter) into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt with their failed business venture and because Fiesta Sunrise has now gone down in history as one of the filthiest restaurants ever featured on the show).
But Vic Flores and the rest of the family have pretty much dropped off the map since then.
Besides some baseless internet rumors (and there are a lot of them floating around the internet about this episode of Kitchen Nightmares) there have not really been any updates about what happened to Vic or Yolanda since their restaurant closed down.
So it seems like fans will just have to make peace with the fact that we may never know what this duo has been up to during the last decade.
Fiesta Sunrise’s Kitchen Nightmares timeline
Kitchen Nightmares, like many other similar reality television programs, films its episodes a few months before the episode actually airs on television.
This allows for ample editing time. But since many of these businesses are already dangerously close to collapsing when Ramsay and his team arrive, it also means that a handful of the Kitchen Nightmares restaurants closed down before they even had the chance to capitalize on the extra publicity from the show.
Unfortunately, Fiesta Sunrise is one such restaurant, and its short Kitchen Nightmares timeline can be summarized as follows:
| Date | Event |
| February 2008 | Gordon Ramsay and the Kitchen Nightmares team show up to film the “Fiesta Sunrise” episode |
| September 2008 | Fiesta Sunrise closes its doors permanently |
| November 13, 2008 | The “Fiesta Sunrise” episode premieres |
What happened to Patti?
Although there are still many details about this episode, this restaurant and its owners which are unclear to this day, one thing that many Kitchen Nightmares fans can agree on is that Patti (the restaurant’s actual owner) certainly got the short end of the stick in this situation.
However, it seems like Patti has stayed in the restaurant industry through the years, and she is now working for a restaurant called Fiesta Mexico in Orangeburg, New York.
The former Fiesta Sunrise location has completely changed shape
By the time that Ramsay visited Fiesta Sunrise, Vic, Yolanda and Patti had only had the restaurant for about 18 months, but they already racked up over $800,000 in debt.
And it seems like no other aspiring restaurateur wanted to go down the same path, as this restaurant’s former location is now occupied by a gas station and it previously had been occupied by a construction rental business.
Was Kitchen Nightmares responsible for Fiesta Sunrise’s closure?
Kitchen Nightmares’ incredibly low success rate has always been a widely-debated topic.
But though we can at least all agree that no one expected Ramsay and his Kitchen Nightmares team to save every business that they visit during the course of the show – we can also agree that the extended closure that these business have to agree to for the filming and makeover process must place a lot of pressure on their already-strained financial situation.
However, in the case of Fiesta Sunrise’s quick closure, it seems like Kitchen Nightmares carries almost none of the blame.
Nyack News & Views reported in November of 2008 that this restaurant had actually been seized after failing to pay its back taxes.
Unfortunately, this failure to comply with paying taxes had become quite the trend for Fiesta Sunrise, as the restaurant had also closed down in 2007 for the same reason.
But it seems like Vic, Yolanda and Patti just no longer had the capital to bail the restaurant out for a second time.
