What Happened to McLanks Family Restaurant? (Columbia, MO)

McLanks Family Restaurant, in Columbia, Missouri, was run by Sheila Lankford together with her five adult children when Robert Irvine and his crew arrived for Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network), in the episode 'A Family Restaurant at War' (S15E3), which aired 2019-07-27. According to the Columbia Missourian, which covered the taping for the local paper, near-constant arguing among the family members had spilled into the dining room and hurt service, while the restaurant's menu and decor showed years of neglect. Irvine's team carried out the show's standard two-day, $10,000 makeover, reworking the menu, refreshing the dining room, and pushing the family toward clearer roles in the kitchen and front of house.

The rescue initially paid off: according to coverage tied to the original broadcast, sales rose by more than 200% in the weeks after the episode aired, and relations among the Lankford children improved. Robert Irvine later returned to McLanks for a follow-up episode, 'Reuniting Family in Missouri,' after the COVID-19 pandemic put new strain on the family business, according to an Apple TV episode listing for that segment. According to a 2025-06-16 recap published on PopThruster, McLanks Family Restaurant closed permanently in June 2021, with Sheila Lankford choosing to step back from the restaurant to focus on her family.

A check of Google Places and the restaurant's former address on 2026-09-08 turned up no trace of McLanks: the Clark Lane location is now occupied by a Golden Corral Buffet & Grill, an unrelated national buffet chain operating under its own name, hours, and online ordering system, according to the chain's own location page for the site. No signage, listing, or website reference to the Lankford family's restaurant remains at the address. The Columbia Missourian's photo gallery from the original production, published alongside its 2019 coverage, remains the primary surviving visual record of the restaurant under the Lankford family's ownership.