restaurantRestaurant: Impossible · Season 20, Episode 4 · Aired January 6, 2022
Jalisco Cafe
San Diego, California
Yes. This one is still open.
On the show
Season 20, Episode 4 · January 6, 2022 · restaurant
episode title: "Dirtiest. Kitchen. Ever."; business name/location manually read from TVmaze episode synopsis (Wikipedia list has no structured data for this season)
What happened after
Mashed.com: still operating under original owner Maria Ozuna as of Oct 2022, "open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week," sister location in Bonita CA.
What happened on the show
Irvine called it one of the filthiest kitchens of his career. At the Jalisco Cafe, owner Maria was contending with bad food, a complacent staff and decades of accumulated grease, and had no real idea how to run a restaurant, which gave Irvine just 48 hours to clean the place up and teach her to lead. He tasted the Mexican menu, scoured that grease-caked kitchen, and reworked the room, closing on a reopening night, the whole cleanup jammed into two days. Since the teaser centers on the filth and Maria's inexperience and gives no dish-level account, so the account rests on a Mexican cafe whose deepest problem was years of buildup and an owner who had never learned to run the place.
After the cameras left
Jalisco Cafe is still open. Per Mashed.com it continued under original owner Maria Ozuna as of October 2022, open for breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week, with a sister location in Bonita. One note for the record: that article places the restaurant in Imperial Beach rather than San Diego as our data has it, a discrepancy flagged for reconciliation. We log it open, medium confidence, the read carried by that one secondary account.
Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.