The Ginger Monkey

What happened after

Ginger Monkey Gastropub (owner/chef Jackson Armstrong, opened 2016) closed; Off 87 bar/grill/live-music venue soft-opened in the same 6,600 sq ft space on Nov 13, 2023, per a directly-fetched local outlet article. Off 87 itself subsequently closed after ~11 months (Oct 2024), per the same source; status of the space since is unconfirmed.

Closure date on record: 2023-11

What happened on the show

An experienced chef who simply could not keep pace with his own success was the puzzle at the Ginger Monkey, a Chandler gastropub owner Jackson Armstrong had opened in 2016. He had the skills, the episode grants, but three years of losses on the books said something was badly wrong at a high-volume restaurant, and Irvine set out to solve the mystery of why a talented cook was failing so completely. He tasted the cooking, dug for why the numbers kept sliding, and turned the room over to his builders before a test service, the whole thing squeezed into the show's usual two days and slim purse. The surviving teaser frames it as a mystery of a good chef in over his head and gives no dish-level teardown, so what remains is the picture of an accomplished owner drowning in the volume of the 6,600-square-foot room he had built.

After the cameras left

The rescue did not hold in the long run. The Ginger Monkey eventually closed, and by November 2023 a bar and grill called Off 87 had soft-opened in the same 6,600-square-foot space at 135 W Ocotillo Road, per a directly fetched local article. Off 87 itself then closed after about eleven months, around October 2024, and whatever occupies the space now is unconfirmed. The Ginger Monkey's own closing date is not documented but necessarily predates the November 2023 replacement.