restaurantRestaurant: Impossible · Season 11, Episode 4 · Aired April 8, 2015
Zest Bistro
Downers Grove, Illinois
It is still up and running.
On the show
Season 11, Episode 4 · April 8, 2015 · restaurant
episode title: "When Life Gives You Lemons"
What happened after
Located inside Lemon Tree Grocer; last confirmed operational via a 2022 directory snapshot.
What happened on the show
When Life Gives You Lemons took season eleven to Zest Bistro, a restaurant tucked inside the Lemon Tree Grocer at 935 West Burlington Avenue in Downers Grove, Illinois, an unusual setup that had Robert Irvine transforming both the restaurant and the surrounding grocery store. Citable interior detail is limited, so we describe the format alongside that documented twist. Irvine tastes the bistro plates, inspects the kitchen, and confronts the operators with the problems behind the struggle, before his crew reworks both the dining room and the grocery aisles across a two-day build on the standard budget and a reopening service follows. The restaurant-inside-a-grocer concept and the Burlington Avenue address are the firm points; the fuller beats of the taping did not survive citably, and we invent nothing to fill them.
After the cameras left
Zest Bistro's current status is uncertain, and we hold it a low-confidence read. The most recent supportive signal is a 2022 directory snapshot showing the restaurant operational inside the Lemon Tree Grocer, but a legitimate local outlet had earlier reported a late-2015 closure for remodeling with a planned spring-2016 reopening, and no source from 2023 through 2026 confirms the current state either way. So the last dependable marker places it running in 2022; beyond that we cannot say whether the Downers Grove spot trades today, and it goes on the re-check list.
Sources
Confidence: low. Last checked 2026-07-19.
What is there now
Street imagery via Google Maps. Location approximate.