restaurantRamsay's Kitchen Nightmares (UK) · Season 5, Episode 5 · Aired November 27, 2007
The Priory
Haywards Heath, West Sussex, England
No longer open. It has closed.
On the show
Season 5, Episode 5 · November 27, 2007 · carvery restaurant
No revisit episode shown within the main run.
What happened after
Carvery/grill switched back to a carvery format after its 2007 Kitchen Nightmares episode; a restaurant-listing aggregator (Sugarvine) currently flags the page as 'reported as closed,' and no live booking/social presence was found.
What happened on the show
The Priory had a problem most restaurants would envy: it was packed. New owner Scott Aitchison explained the catch to Ramsay in Haywards Heath, that nearly everyone was using fifty-percent-off vouchers on the carvery, effectively paying about five pounds for a full meal, less than the food cost, so the restaurant lost money on almost every plate. Ramsay tore into head chef Toby's work ethic and was appalled by a kitchen crammed with stale food and grimy, corroded gear, which he ordered ripped out, though he suspected the staff were simply bored by an unchanging menu. He set up a new grill menu, but Toby cooked it even worse than the carvery, so Ramsay handed the kitchen to general manager Matt, an experienced chef, and demoted Toby to sous chef. Under Matt the kitchen finally held a service together. On the revisit Matt still led, Toby had been fired for serving expired chicken, and Scott was only half-committing to the new menu.
After the cameras left
The Priory appears to have closed, though the evidence is the softest kind. A restaurant-listing aggregator flags its page as reported as closed, and we found no live booking system or active social presence to contradict that. We flag this as low confidence: the only closed signal is that aggregator note rather than a news report, the contemporary local coverage documents pre-closure struggles only, and no exact closing date surfaced. So the honest reading for the Haywards Heath carvery is closed, unconfirmed by any dated primary source, a status we would revise the moment better evidence appears.
Sources
Confidence: low. Last checked 2026-07-19.