The Granary

What happened after

Destroyed by an arson fire in January 2008, weeks after its Kitchen Nightmares episode aired; an arsonist was later found to have been paid to torch the pub.

Closure date on record: 2008-01

What happened on the show

The Granary was the project of ambitious entrepreneur Nigel Nieddu, first meant as an exclusive club for the well-off, then rebranded when that image left the Fareham locals cold and the customers thin. Over lunch Ramsay saw the restaurant did not deliver on its modern British billing, the menu overrun with dishes like shark with mozzarella that the kitchen could not manage. That kitchen was run by Martin, who had taken on two troubled teenage boys to steer them back on track through cooking. Ramsay booked the room to half capacity to test the brigade, and even that overwhelmed them; he pinned much of it on Nigel, who had no experience running a restaurant, could not control the floor, and bridled at criticism. After talking Nigel into a simpler British menu and giving Martin more control, the staff threw a food fair to win the community back. The reopening started well before Martin buckled under the numbers.

After the cameras left

The Granary's ending was violent rather than commercial. In January 2008, weeks after its episode aired, the restaurant was destroyed by an arson fire, and an arsonist was later found to have been paid to torch it. We hold this at high confidence: the Portsmouth paper ran a detailed account of the arson prosecution independent of any Kitchen Nightmares tracker, and a second regional outlet confirms the date of the fire. It is about as clean an evidence trail as this dataset offers, and one of the strangest epilogues, a Fareham restaurant that did not fail so much as it was deliberately burned down.