Is Josephine's Cooking Still Open? Restaurant: Impossible (FN) Update

Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network) opened season 15 with a visit to Josephine's Cooking, a longstanding soul-food restaurant in Chicago's Chatham neighborhood, in the episode "Hard Times at Josephine's," which aired July 20, 2019. The restaurant traces back to 1986, when its founder first opened a restaurant under an earlier name in the same South Side community; by the time of this episode it had operated under the Josephine's Cooking name for years as a fixture of the neighborhood. Chef Robert Irvine's visit focused on the restaurant's serious financial strain and on encouraging a family transition of day-to-day leadership from the aging founder to her son and co-owner, alongside kitchen and service fixes aimed at ending chronically slow ticket times.

Block Club Chicago, a local nonprofit news outlet, covered the episode's local significance, describing the restaurant as a decades-old community staple that had finally received the renovation its supporters felt it deserved. The same coverage noted that the city of Chicago had honored the founder in 2017 by co-naming a stretch of 79th Street after her, underscoring the restaurant's standing in the neighborhood independent of the show. The restaurant continues to operate today under the Josephine's Cooking name at 436 E 79th St. Its own website, josephinescooking.net, remains active and describes it as a current Chicago soul-food restaurant, and Yelp's listing for the business, last updated in September 2026, shows continuing reviews and current information.

No reporting was found describing any closure, rename, or change in ownership since the 2019 episode. The business maintains its own current, official website in addition to a separately updated 2026 Yelp listing. This episode aired in Restaurant: Impossible's fifteenth season, the second season of the show's 2019 return following a multi-year gap after season 13's original run in 2016.