Restaurant: Impossible · S16 E8
Drake's Place
Ferguson, Missouri
This one survived. It remains in business.
The short answer
Drake's Place Restaurant & BBQ Smokehouse; official site listed active, Dec 27 2025 Facebook activity, TripAdvisor 4.6/5 (#4 of 17 Ferguson restaurants).
What happened on the show
Family, not food, was the fault line at Drake's Place, a beloved neighborhood restaurant in Ferguson that Sonny and Bridget had built and were now close to losing. Two knots tangled the business at once: they wished their son would step up and carry more, yet Sonny could not bring himself to hand over control, and the restaurant they hoped to turn into a family legacy was running out of both money and options. Irvine's job here bent more toward the people than the plates. Across his two days he tasted the kitchen's output, pressed on the operation, and worked the harder problem of a father who would not let go, before his design and build team reset the room on the series' roughly ten grand and a relaunch service tested whether the family could run it together. The record we have leans on that generational standoff rather than a menu teardown, so the honest account keeps its weight on Sonny loosening his grip enough for the next generation to matter.
After the cameras left
Drake's Place made it through. Now operating as Drake's Place Restaurant and BBQ Smokehouse at 701 S Florissant Road, it shows an active official site, Facebook activity dated December 27, 2025, and a 4.6 out of 5 on TripAdvisor that ranks it fourth of seventeen Ferguson restaurants. A direct fetch of the restaurant's own site failed on an SSL handshake error, likely a certificate quirk rather than a closed door, so we hold this at confirmed operating as of late 2025 on the strength of the review and social evidence.
Location
701 S Florissant Rd, Ferguson MO 63135
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Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.