What Happened to Barefoot Bob's After Kitchen Nightmares? (Hull, MA)

Barefoot Bob's Beach Grill was a beachside restaurant and outdoor tiki bar on Nantasket Beach in Hull, Massachusetts, opened in the summer of 2004 and bought by husband-and-wife owners Marc and Lisa in 2007; the tiki bar was among the restaurant's most recognized features, drawing summer beachgoers to Nantasket Beach for years before the show's visit. The Kitchen Nightmares episode, which aired December 7, 2012, showed a business that saw its trade collapse every winter and a kitchen where, according to the show, equipment had gone uncleaned for a long stretch and food-safety practices had broken down -- including warm cooked chicken stored alongside raw pork on the floor of the walk-in refrigerator. Ramsay replaced the restaurant's tiki theme with a more nautical, yacht-club-styled redesign and reworked the menu.

What has happened since: according to a Yelp reviewer cited in later coverage, a former employee said the restaurant reverted to its original tiki decor and menu not long after the show aired. NBC Boston, republishing a report from its sister site Boston Restaurant Talk, found on April 11, 2017 that Barefoot Bob's appeared to have closed: the building was locked and dark, its phone was disconnected, its Facebook page was down, and both Google and Yelp had marked the business permanently closed. The report also noted that a poster on a Groupon deal page for the restaurant said Groupon had refunded the purchase.

A restaurant-tracking blog separately placed the business's last known Facebook activity in December 2016, a detail not independently confirmed for this report. The episode also showed Ramsay walking through a nearly empty dining room during the off-season, underscoring the seasonal swings that made year-round staffing difficult for Marc and Lisa's small crew. A Yelp listing for the Nantasket Avenue address remains marked permanently closed as of a September 2026 update.