Scrimmages

What happened after

closed; cited two-and-a-half-star Yelp reviews as a contributing factor

Closure date on record: 2013-11

What happened on the show

Four partners, four sets of opinions, and no profit left to argue over: Scrimmages, a sports bar in Wilmington, Delaware, was as much a broken partnership as a broken business by the time Irvine arrived. The relationships among the owners had frayed past the point most people would push through, and he found himself repairing personalities alongside the restaurant. Across his two days he tackled the operational mess and tried to force the partners back onto the same page, the interpersonal work often outweighing anything happening in the kitchen. The physical refresh fit the show's fixed schedule and its deliberately modest renovation fund. Whatever brief lift the makeover gave, it did not last; Scrimmages later closed, with weak review scores cited among the reasons the sports bar could not stay afloat.

After the cameras left

Scrimmages closed around November 2013, with a retrospective citing weak Yelp reviews, in the two-and-a-half-star range, as a contributing factor. The account rests on a single secondary retrospective, so we hold both the timing and the cause at medium confidence. Note that this Wilmington sits in Delaware, distinct from the North Carolina city that was home to Salt Works II earlier in the series. A sports bar run by a partnership already beyond repair was a difficult save from the outset.