Is Holiday: Impossible (Boys & Girls Club of Southwest… Still Open?

This installment of Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network), broadcast as a holiday special titled "Holiday: Impossible" on December 9, 2012, departed from the show's usual restaurant-rescue format. Instead of a struggling commercial restaurant, Robert Irvine and fellow chef Michael Chiarello traveled to Joplin, Missouri, a town that had been struck by a devastating EF5 tornado on May 22, 2011 that killed roughly 160 people, injured about 1,000 more, and destroyed close to a quarter of the town. The featured site was the Boys & Girls Club of Southwest Missouri, whose facility had become an informal safe haven for local children in the tornado's aftermath; club attendance had roughly doubled since the tornado, but the organization's funding had not kept pace with that increased demand.

Irvine's challenge in the episode was twofold: renovate the club's kitchen and common spaces into something both children and parents would want to spend time in, and organize a thank-you dinner for about 1,000 volunteers who had been working on the town's ongoing tornado recovery, prepared and served within a five-hour window on a $30,000 budget and a three-day deadline. Irvine drew on help from Chiarello and members of his prior "Dinner: Impossible" production crew to pull off the dinner service. Because this was a nonprofit community facility rather than a commercial restaurant, there is no restaurant "relaunch" to report in the usual sense -- the episode's outcome was the completed kitchen renovation and the volunteer dinner itself. The Boys & Girls Club of Southwest Missouri continues to operate at the same Comingo Avenue address in Joplin today; Joplin Business Outlook reported in May 2026 that the club was preparing to host its annual "Clubbing for the Club" golf-tournament fundraiser at Eagle Creek Golf Club on June 4, 2026, and the organization's own website maintains an active events and news presence, indicating continued operations well over a decade after the special aired.