Restaurant: Impossible · S1 E2
Mainelli's
Providence, Rhode Island
It closed and is no longer operating in 2013. The site is now home to Machupicchu Restaurant II (per secondary source, unconfirmed by primary).
The short answer
closed after a vehicle crashed into the building; owners lacked resources to reopen, property later sold
What happened on the show
Poor service, an unwieldy menu, and a kitchen crew that could not reliably cook the food met Robert Irvine at Mainelli's, an Italian spot in Providence. Food-safety problems ran deep enough that the kitchen had to be shut down, scrubbed, and its staff retrained before anything else could happen, a rare escalation even for this show. From there the visit followed the series template: a heavy renovation of the dining room and a revamp aimed at pulling the operation out of its slump. The transformation was dramatic on camera, and the room looked markedly better for the reveal. What the makeover could not do was rewrite the underlying economics of a struggling neighborhood restaurant, and the built-in two-day, roughly ten-thousand-dollar ceiling meant Irvine's crew fixed what they could see and left the rest to the owners.
After the cameras left
Fate, more than the food, closed Mainelli's. The Chalkstone Avenue restaurant in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood shut down after a vehicle crashed into the building, and the owners lacked the resources to reopen; the property was later sold. Sources disagree on timing, one placing it in January 2012 and another in September 2013, so we lean toward the later, better-corroborated date. A business called Machupicchu Restaurant II is reported to have taken the space, though that succession comes from a secondary source we could not confirm against a primary record.
Location
Providence, Rhode Island
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Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.