J Willy's

What happened after

American restaurant closed in February 2009, a few months after its Oct 2008 episode.

Closure date on record: 2009-02

What happened on the show

Handed a loaded baked potato pizza that looked wrong, Ramsay spotted a priest dining nearby and asked him to say a prayer before he tasted it. That was J Willy's, a South Bend restaurant that owners Rick and Tricia had left in their friend John Ittenbach's hands while they ran another business three hours away, and it had slid to rock bottom. The ribs wore a generic sauce over untrimmed fat, and the pulled pork earned the line that it had been pulled straight out of the bin. John admitted there was no chef, just two cooks working from cut-corner ingredients, and shrugged that the recipes stay the same regardless. Ramsay found a frozen pizza in the kitchen and, in the walk-in, rotten potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and chicken. Rick confessed the debt had grown so deep that he and Tricia could not afford to have children, while the staff traded blame over who had let the place die.

After the cameras left

J Willy's did not make it far past the broadcast. The South Bend restaurant, at 52885 State Road 933 North, closed in February 2009, only a few months after its October 2008 episode. An absentee ownership arrangement, no head chef, and a walk-in full of spoiled produce added up to a business that, as Ramsay put it, everyone involved had already given up on.