restaurantRestaurant: Impossible · Season 16, Episode 1 · Aired December 26, 2019
Southern Grille of Ellendale
Ellendale, Delaware
Open. The rescue stuck and it continues to operate.
On the show
Season 16, Episode 1 · December 26, 2019 · restaurant
episode title: "Dumplings in Delaware"; business name/location manually read from TVmaze episode synopsis (Wikipedia list has no structured data for this season)
What happened after
Southern home-cooking restaurant listed 'Open Now'; own website and active Facebook page (4.3/5, 612 reviews) found.
What happened on the show
Dumplings in Delaware opened season sixteen at the Southern Grille of Ellendale in Ellendale, Delaware, and the documented setup is clear from the episode summary. The owner, Ronald, was working too hard to be carrying so much debt at his Southern-style restaurant, and the stakes were framed plainly: if Robert Irvine could not help him reconnect with what made him and the restaurant special, the local spot for Southern home cooking was doomed. Within the show's two-day frame and its roughly ten-thousand-dollar budget, Irvine tastes the Southern home-cooking menu, inspects the kitchen, and works to break through the owner's exhaustion and debt before his design and build team resets the dining room and a reopening service tests the result. The owner's name, the Southern-cooking concept, and the debt-and-burnout framing are the firm, documented points here.
After the cameras left
The Southern Grille of Ellendale looks to be open. It was listed as open with an active status, and both its own website and a Facebook page carrying a 4.3 rating across more than six hundred reviews surfaced, all consistent with a running business, though the URLs came via snippet, not a live load, so the call stays moderate, and we note that one listing showed a nearby Milford address for the same phone number. the best read is that the Ellendale Southern-cooking restaurant still trades on Main Street, with a substantial review base behind it.
Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.
What is there now
Street imagery via Google Maps. Location approximate.