hotelHotel Hell · Season 1, Episode 3 · Aired August 20, 2012
Cambridge Hotel
Cambridge, New York
No longer open. It has closed. The site is now home to The Cambridge Assisted Living (repurposed, non-hotel use).
What happened after
No longer operating as a hotel. Same building (4 West Main St) now houses The Cambridge, an assisted-living/senior-care facility operated by ICC Management & Consulting.
What happened on the show
The Cambridge Hotel earned its footnote in food history as the claimed birthplace of pie a la mode back in the 1890s, but by the time Ramsay reached Cambridge, New York, its famous pie came frozen and raw. Owner John Imhof, a lawyer and former Army judge, ran the place as what Ramsay saw as an ineffective busybody, hovering over a staff that could manage fine without him. The kitchen leaned on boil-in-the-bag precooked food. Ramsay overhauled the decor and the menu and built a dedicated room where guests could sit down to that freshly baked pie topped with house-made ice cream. To prove the staff could handle a service alone, he locked John in a derelict upstairs room, and the packed dinner ran without a hitch, which finally taught the owner to trust his team. Ramsay took a particular liking to Scooter, a young kitchen assistant who had survived two heart surgeries and a back surgery, and offered to pay for the rest of his college education.
After the cameras left
The rescue never had a chance to prove itself. The lender bank moved before the episode even aired, and the Cambridge Hotel closed its doors. The building at 4 West Main Street did not stay empty: it was repurposed for senior care, and as of our latest verification pass it houses an assisted-living facility run by ICC Management and Consulting, whose own materials acknowledge the site was once the historic Cambridge Hotel. The shared address ties the two together cleanly. The birthplace of the pie still stands in Cambridge, just no longer as a hotel.
Sources
Confidence: high. Last checked 2026-07-19.
What is there now
Street imagery via Google Maps. Location approximate.