What Happened to Angelo's Family Restaurant? (Woodstock, IL)

Part 1 — Season 6, Episode 9 Aired June 23, 2013

Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network) visited Angelo's Family Restaurant, a diner on the Woodstock, Illinois town square at 117 E. Van Buren Street, for the episode "It's All Greek to Me," which aired June 23, 2013, with filming in April 2013. Angelo's had operated for nearly 40 years under founders Peter Mourelatos and Dennis Paloumbis, brothers-in-law who opened it as a neighborhood diner on the square. As shown in the episode, host Robert Irvine's team spent about $10,000 and roughly two days remodeling the restaurant, changing elements of the interior layout and decor.

According to Shaw Local (then the Northwest Herald), reactions to those changes were mixed: some customers liked parts of the new look, but others did not, and family member Angelo Mourelatos said the restaurant needed additional work afterward just to get back on track. Shaw Local reported on December 27, 2013, that the founding family had decided it was time to retire and sold the business two weeks earlier to George Kanakaris, a McHenry County restaurateur who had earlier opened Papa G's restaurants in Huntley and Elburn. Kanakaris closed the diner for about a week to ten days in early January 2014, restored several original features such as the counter and booths that the show's renovation had altered, and reopened it under the new name Papa G's, while keeping the same Van Buren Street address.

Mourelatos told Shaw Local that changes made during and after the television renovation were a contributing factor in the family's decision to sell. Papa G's ran on the square until 2017: Shaw Local reported on April 16, 2017 that Huntley food distributor Thomas Teresi had taken over the restaurant after Kanakaris retired and had changed its name and menu, opening The Double Yolk Cafe, a different restaurant that kept the same waitstaff. The Double Yolk Cafe has since closed as well, according to its Yelp and Restaurantji listings.

Part 2 — Season 7, Episode x96 Aired February 12, 2014

Robert Irvine checked back in on Angelo's Family Restaurant in Woodstock, Illinois, in a Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network) revisit segment billed as "Restaurant More Impossible," which aired February 12, 2014. Angelo's had gone through an original renovation episode in an earlier season, when Irvine reworked the Greek-diner menu and refreshed the Van Buren Street space. The follow-up segment looked at how the business and the family running it had fared since that visit. Shaw Local, the Woodstock-area paper that had covered the original episode, reported on December 27, 2013 that the founding family had sold the business to George Kanakaris, who planned to reopen it as Papa G's and undo some of the show's changes; Shaw Local later reported, in April 2017, that a new owner had replaced Papa G's with The Double Yolk Cafe, a different restaurant with a new name and menu. The original episode, "It's All Greek to Me," aired on June 23, 2013.