Is Max's Still Open? Kitchen Nightmares Update (Long Branch, NJ)

Max's Bar & Grill, previously known as Max's Hotdogs, has served the Jersey Shore community from Matilda Terrace in Long Branch, New Jersey since 1928 and is owned by Jennifer Maybaum, according to coverage of the episode by the entertainment site Mashed. The restaurant was featured in Kitchen Nightmares Season 8, Episode 9, filmed in June 2023 and airing December 4, 2023 as part of a two-episode season finale paired with the Diwan episode in Port Washington. At the time of filming, Maybaum was said to be more than $1 million in debt and worried that the restaurant, then five years from its hundredth anniversary, would not survive to reach it.

Coverage ahead of the episode described Ramsay mediating between the restaurant's divorced co-owners as they worked through personal frustrations that were affecting day-to-day operations, in addition to addressing the restaurant's finances and menu. As part of the relaunch, Ramsay updated the restaurant's menu and operations while retaining its signature hot dogs, the dish that built its reputation over nearly a century in business. The Long Branch episode closed out Kitchen Nightmares' first stretch of revived-season restaurants outside Manhattan and Brooklyn proper, following stops earlier in the season at Bel Aire Diner in Astoria, El Cantito in Yonkers, and South Brooklyn Foundry in Bay Ridge, according to trade coverage tracking the season's geography.

Max's history as a nearly century-old, family-associated hot dog stand made it something of an outlier among the season's newer businesses, most of which had opened within the preceding several years. According to a Mashed update published in February 2025, Max's had survived beyond the show, though Google's business listing showed the restaurant operating only three days a week at that point, a reduction from a fuller weekly schedule. A Yelp listing for the restaurant, updated in August 2026, shows an expanded schedule of five open days a week and describes the business as celebrating 97 years in operation, offering the same hot dogs alongside a fuller bar and grill menu, live music, and karaoke.