Mamma D's

What happened after

shut down after 17 years; owner Luigi (Louie) Desiato; Philadelphia Inquirer covered the closure

Closure date on record: 2013-10/11

What happened on the show

Owner Luigi had crammed every one of his passions into a single Pipersville property: an Italian restaurant, a farm, a vineyard, and a wine shop. Robert Irvine's first objection was the animals on the premises, which he opposed on food-safety grounds and for the smell, and their removal became his opening move. He also shut down a separate food station that had been preparing different items than the main kitchen, and promoted Luigi's son, a fully trained chef who had been given no freedom, to head chef. The dining room got decluttered and revamped by the design and build team, all on the show's fixed two-day, roughly ten-thousand-dollar schedule. Untangling one man's overstuffed vision into a functioning restaurant was the real project, and empowering the son to actually cook was the heart of it.

After the cameras left

Mamma D's shut down after seventeen years, with the closing landing around October or November 2013. Owner Luigi, also known as Louie, Desiato saw the Bucks County restaurant covered in its final days by the Philadelphia Inquirer, which lifts this above the show's usual retrospective sourcing. We rate the closure high confidence. The attached vineyard-and-farm concept that so worried Irvine on food-safety grounds could not, in the end, keep the restaurant at its center alive.