Mama Rita's

What happened after

Mexican restaurant (cantina) closed soon after its March 19, 2010 episode; no exact date given.

Closure date on record: 2010

What happened on the show

Chimichanga? Ramsay's verdict was to chuck it in the bin. Mama Rita's, in Newbury Park, was Laura's restaurant, named for her grandmother, and her core problem was that she still ran it like the catering business she had genuinely succeeded at before. Food came out fast because Perla and the cooks leaned on microwaves, but the tamales were like soaking wet newspaper, the burrito like wet cardboard, and every dish arrived dry. Ramsay told Laura flatly that a restaurant is not catering, cracked that all it was missing was a drive-thru, and in the walk-in found 12,000 dollars of frozen and pre-portioned product, some of it a year old. He laid the entire hoard out across the dining room to make the point that she was running a factory, not a kitchen. Laura kept defending the model because it had worked for catering, until Ramsay convinced her to throw the lot out and cook fresh.

After the cameras left

The pivot to fresh food came too late. Mama Rita's, at 360 Via Las Brisas in Newbury Park, closed soon after its March 2010 episode, the timing loose enough that only the year is certain. A single mother in deep debt and facing foreclosure, running a dine-in room on catering habits, did not have the cushion to absorb a full reinvention. Ramsay's diagnosis, a factory rather than a restaurant, proved to be the whole story.