Is Besse's on Clear Lake Still Open? Restaurant: Impossible (FN) Update

Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network) sent Chef Robert Irvine to Besse's on Clear Lake, a lakefront steakhouse in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, for the episode "Lakefront Disaster," which aired August 31, 2019. Owner Brenda Graff and her husband ran the restaurant on Clear Lake, and Graff told the crew she had fallen three months behind on her mortgage payments after a difficult winter left the business with mounting problems and little cash on hand. When Irvine reviewed the books, he found food costs so high that, by his own calculation, the restaurant lost money on nearly every item on the menu, compounding tired décor that did little to draw in lakefront traffic.

Over 48 hours, Irvine's team reworked the dining room and overhauled the menu to correct the food-cost problems he had identified, while pushing Graff to address roughly $40,000 in accumulated debt. Graff said the experience changed how she ran the front of house, pushing her toward firmer boundaries with staff after years of covering shifts and tasks herself rather than delegating. In the months after the episode aired, Graff paid down the $40,000 in debt Irvine had flagged and began drawing a paycheck from the business, according to a Food Network Gossip recap published in August 2019.

A Yelp listing for Besse's on Clear Lake, updated in July 2026, records 43 reviews and 35 photos tied to the restaurant's original name and its Northern Lights Circle address on Clear Lake. Separately, popthruster.com reported on June 17, 2025, that the restaurant remains open and under the Graff family, noting that the property was listed for sale at the time but had not changed hands. Neither source describes any change to the restaurant's name, menu concept, or ownership since the 2019 episode, and both point to the same Tomahawk address the show originally visited.