What Happened to Blackberry's After Kitchen Nightmares? (Plainfield, NJ)

Blackberry's was a soul-food restaurant in Plainfield, New Jersey, run by owner and executive chef Shelly Withers, who had put her mother's retirement savings into the business. The Season 5 premiere, airing September 23, 2011, showed a colorful purple-and-yellow dining room that stayed nearly empty most nights. Staff told Gordon Ramsay that Withers ran the kitchen her own way and often blocked them from doing their jobs, leaving too many people crowded around too few tasks. Ramsay found the menu overloaded and short on the soul-food character its name promised, and during his walkthrough discovered a dead mouse at the restaurant's entrance, a moment Withers and her general-manager partner accused him of staging for the cameras.

The accusation visibly angered Ramsay and briefly threatened to end the visit before an apology smoothed things over. Ramsay reorganized the kitchen, introduced a clearer leadership structure among the staff, and helped simplify the menu around the soul-food dishes the restaurant was named for. By the episode's end, Withers had walked out of a confrontation with Ramsay rather than continue discussing the changes, and Ramsay told the family that Withers herself was the one thing about the restaurant he could not fix. According to Tasting Table (2026-06-15), the relaunch's improvements did not hold: within a few months, diner reviews described food and service sliding back toward the restaurant's pre-show standards, including complaints about oversalted, greasy dishes and unhappy staff still audible from the dining room.

Blackberry's remained open for roughly a year and a half after the broadcast. The business's own Facebook page announced in March 2013 that the Plainfield location would close, with plans at the time to relocate; per The Daily Meal (2023-09-16), that relocation never happened, though the business kept offering private catering under the Blackberry's name for several more years, including a Facebook post marking 25 years in catering in 2019 and an Easter catering menu advertised in 2024. Withers moved into food-service work with Aramark starting in 2013, a position her LinkedIn profile still listed as of 2026, according to The Daily Meal.