What Happened to Burger Kitchen After Kitchen Nightmares?

Burger Kitchen was a gourmet hamburger restaurant on West Third Street in Los Angeles, opened in 2010 by Alan and Gen Saffron. Alan financed part of the restaurant with $250,000 he managed on behalf of his son Daniel's inheritance, a decision Daniel had not agreed to and that strained their relationship throughout the two-part episode, which aired November 4, 2011 (Season 5, episodes 5 and 6). Sixteen months in, the restaurant was losing $5,000 to $6,000 a month, had gone through about ten chefs and twenty servers, and had changed its menu roughly once a month.

Alan blamed negative Yelp reviews for the decline; Gordon Ramsay was openly skeptical. When Ramsay ordered a sampling of the signature burgers, both the California burger and the restaurant's award-winning burger arrived undercooked despite requests for specific temperatures, and longtime chef David, frustrated by a lack of real authority in the kitchen, walked out mid-tasting and did not return. The neighborhood itself was not the problem: Third Street was, by the episode's own account, a lively, well-trafficked part of Los Angeles well suited to a burger restaurant, which only underscored how much the family's internal conflict, rather than the location or the concept, was dragging the business down.

In the second half of the two-part episode, with some of the family tension eased, Ramsay simplified the burger menu and ran a head-to-head cook-off between kitchen staff to help settle who should lead service going forward. The Saffrons responded well to the leaner menu and the more consistent cooking it produced, and the relaunch drew renewed local attention and positive early reviews. The improvement did not hold. According to Dexerto (updated 2025-08-06), Burger Kitchen's closure came in February 2012, only months after the episodes aired. Alan Saffron, an Australian army veteran who had become a fan favorite on the show for his confidence in his own cooking, died in April 2020 at age 71 following a heart attack, per the same report.