Restaurant: Impossible · S21 E1
Smith's Soul Food Bistro
Gastonia, North Carolina
Open. The rescue stuck and it continues to operate.
The short answer
Mashed.com: "The bistro is still in business and is still on its mission to help the community." June 2022 community food giveaway (20,000 lbs of meat) cited as evidence of continued operation.
What happened on the show
An ex-basketball coach was using her restaurant to give neighborhood kids a purpose, and it was quietly going broke. Cheryl ran Smith's Soul Food Bistro in Gastonia with a real mission, hiring young people from her community, but the episode is candid that she had no idea how to run the place and was hemorrhaging money toward closing. Teaching Cheryl to run her bistro with the discipline she had once demanded on the court was the whole aim, and the makeover pointed there start to finish. Because the teaser centers on that mission and Cheryl's inexperience, not the plates, what remains is a bistro whose survival mattered as much for the kids it employed as for its owner, a restaurant that doubled as a youth program with two futures on the same balance sheet.
After the cameras left
Smith's Soul Food Bistro is still in business and still on its mission. Per Mashed.com, the bistro continued serving the community, with a June 2022 food giveaway of some 20,000 pounds of meat cited as evidence of ongoing operation under owner Cheryl. The single Mashed account carries it, so medium confidence and nothing fresher than mid-2022. That June 2022 community giveaway remains the most concrete public sign of ongoing operation.
Location
Gastonia, North Carolina
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Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.