restaurantRamsay's Costa del Nightmares · Season 1, Episode 1 · Aired September 23, 2014
Mayfair Restaurante (renamed Jack's Chicken Shack)
Fuengirola, Andalusia, Spain
We were unable to verify whether it is still operating. The last confirmed sighting we found dates to 2014.
On the show
Season 1, Episode 1 · September 23, 2014 · restaurant
UK/Channel 4 production; business physically on the Costa del Sol, Málaga province, Spain. Relaunched mid-episode as a fried-chicken concept named Jack's Chicken Shack.
What happened after
Converted from failing Mayfair Restaurante to Jack's Chicken Shack on air (2014); a contemporaneous Mirror report said the relaunch was already 'in crisis.' Facebook page's last visible activity dates to Aug 2018. A direct restaurantguru.com fetch shows no explicit closed/open tag and reviews from 7-8 years ago -- no reliable signal either way found within budget.
What happened on the show
The Mayfair Restaurante had once thrived on the Costa del Sol before Gordon Ramsay found it sliding, and he laid the blame squarely on owner Jack. Jack refused to part with a head chef named Juan, kept hygiene so poor that Ramsay shut the place for a full day just to deep-clean it, and had crammed the dining room with piles of useless clutter. Ramsay first pegged Jack's son John as the future of the business, then soured on him after learning John's side venture, a car hire firm, was failing and had swallowed 40,000 euros of his parents' money. He extracted a promise from John to close the hire business and repay them, pushed Jack to clear out his hoard, and relaunched the Fuengirola restaurant as Jack's Chicken Shack, a fried-chicken concept with a fresh menu. The first service stumbled on John's shaky grip of the ordering system before he found his footing and got through it. On the revisit the room was still busy, Juan had shifted to tending bar under a younger chef of the same name, and the kitchen had stayed clean, though John, still owing his parents, was made to sign an IOU.
After the cameras left
Jack's Chicken Shack is the one venue in this Channel 4 run we cannot pin down. A contemporaneous newspaper report suggested the relaunched Fuengirola operation was already in crisis not long after the cameras left, and the business's Facebook page shows no visible activity after August 2018. A direct look at its restaurant listing turned up neither an explicit closed tag nor any recent sign of life, just reviews going back seven or eight years. None of that adds up to a confirmed status either way. So we log it honestly: last confirmed around 2018, with current trading unverifiable. Unlike the other three Costa venues in this season, where the same checks surfaced a clear permanently-closed marker, Jack's Chicken Shack simply went quiet, and we will not guess at an ending the record does not show.
Sources
Last checked 2026-07-19.