restaurantMystery Diners · Season 9, Episode 8 · Aired March 25, 2015
Toast and Tartine
New Orleans, Louisiana
Good outcome here: the business is still trading today.
On the show
Season 9, Episode 8 · March 25, 2015 · restaurant (bistro/cafe)
repeat-offender employee theft sting
What happened after
Represents two sister restaurants under the same ownership (Cara and Evan Benson): Tartine (opened 2010) and Toast (opened 2014, multiple locations); both still operate under their individual names.
What happened on the show
Cara Benson owned two New Orleans restaurants, Toast and Tartine, and worried an unhealthy rivalry had sprung up between them. The sting produced a Mystery Diners callback: investigator Patrick turned up a Toast waitress, Dee Dee, whom Charles Stiles had busted two years earlier at another restaurant. As aired, the two rooms had been selling each other's meals on their managers' orders, one manager also sabotaging the other with large prank to-go orders left to spoil, while the reformed Dee Dee genuinely tried to do well. The confrontation has Cara firing the sabotaging manager, warning the other, and suspending Dee Dee for not disclosing her past firing. Given the scripting claims that later dogged Mystery Diners, this two-restaurant sting is best framed as broadcast rather than as verified.
After the cameras left
Both sister restaurants are still open, going concerns the episode never threatened. Under the same ownership, Tartine and Toast each still operate under their own names, Toast across several New Orleans locations, per their own sites in our 2026 pass, at medium confidence. Two established rooms that appeared on a crisis show simply kept serving, their survival the ordinary kind rather than a rescue. The manufactured rivalry made an episode; it was never the measure of whether either would last, and both have.
Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.
What is there now
Street imagery via Google Maps. Location approximate.