Is Blake's Place Still Open? Kitchen Nightmares Update (New Orleans, LA)

Blake's Place, a Creole-Italian restaurant in the Riverbend neighborhood of New Orleans, appeared in season 9, episode 10 of Kitchen Nightmares, "Blake's Place," which aired March 11, 2025. Owner-executive chef Blake Cressey opened the restaurant in 2023 at 724 Dublin Street after building a following selling food from home and later running a food truck, Tasty Treat, with the goal of eventually expanding into her own line of restaurants, seasonings and cookware. By the time of filming, Cressey and her husband and investor, Nelson, were more than $200,000 in debt, a strain compounded by a demanding pregnancy with twins that had pulled Cressey away from daily oversight of the kitchen.

As shown in the episode, Ramsay found the food inauthentic and poorly executed: the crab cakes were mushy, a crawfish-and-fries dish was watery, and a specialty dish was oversalted; after Ramsay raised the seasoning issue, the kitchen sent out an unseasoned catfish plate in response. Ramsay later learned that most of Cressey's dishes relied on produce dressed with pre-made sauces and her own spice blends rather than food built from scratch, and that a room meant to be private dining had instead become storage for those ingredients. Cressey's chef de cuisine told Ramsay privately that she rated the food a 2 out of 10 and would have left the job if Cressey were not a friend.

Ramsay confronted Cressey over prioritizing expansion plans, including roughly $50,000 spent on cookware still in storage, over the food in front of her, and the two clashed before her husband helped close the kitchen for the night; Cressey later returned to work through the disagreement with Ramsay's team. His crew then reworked the menu toward more traditionally New Orleans dishes, brightened the dining room and added a proper private dining area for the relaunch. Since the show's fall 2024 makeover, Blake's Place has added catering, private events, weekend happy hours and R&B brunch specials, along with live music on some evenings, according to a recap by entertainment site Moviedelic (2025-03-11), which also noted the restaurant was featured in the NFL's guide to New Orleans ahead of Super Bowl LIX in February 2025. As of research in September 2026, the restaurant's listing pages continued to show an active address with ongoing customer reviews, though no single 2026-dated news account of its ongoing operation was located.