restaurantMystery Diners · Season 8, Episode 2 · Aired October 20, 2014
Cookin' with Lenny Smokehouse
Chatsworth, California
We could not confirm its current status.
On the show
Season 8, Episode 2 · October 20, 2014 · restaurant (BBQ/smokehouse)
food-poaching/theft sting
What happened after
Own site cookinwithlenny.net (directly fetched) is clearly stale/abandoned -- most recent dated content is an event listing from 6/10/16, plus generic 'Create a free website' builder placeholder text in the footer -- but no explicit closure statement was found anywhere.
What happened on the show
Lenny Bent was missing supplies and losing catering work at his Chatsworth smokehouse and feared a staffer was running a catering business on his back. Charles Stiles brought in mystery diners Amanda and Kiel plus guest restaurateur Brooke Williamson, and even a drone to track the sting. As aired, a manager and a cook had a side catering operation of their own, built on Lenny's recipes, the manager poaching his coworkers and lying to a prospective client about the party minimum to steer the job away, while a waitress delivered poor service besides. The confrontation has Lenny firing the manager and the cook. Given the scripting claims that later dogged Mystery Diners, this catering-poaching sting is best framed as broadcast rather than as verified.
After the cameras left
After the episode, Cookin' with Lenny is hard to confirm. Its own site is plainly stale, its most recent dated content from 2016 under a generic website-builder footer, but no explicit closure statement surfaced in our 2026 pass, so we hold it at last confirmed rather than assert closed on a hunch. A decade-dead website leans one way, but leaning is not evidence, and Mystery Diners left no rescue to trace. The honest answer is that the record cannot settle it.
Sources
Last checked 2026-07-19.
What is there now
Street imagery via Google Maps. Location approximate.