What Happened to Moss' Prime Rib & Spaghetti House? (Elyria, OH)

On Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network), Robert Irvine opened Season 3 at Moss' Prime Rib & Spaghetti House, a restaurant in Elyria, Ohio that, according to the episode, had been open since 1958. Irvine found that the core problem went beyond food or decor: owners Robert and Sandi Moss were, in the show's account, resistant to feedback and reluctant to change long-standing habits, which complicated the usual two-day, $10,000 renovation. The episode, which aired February 8, 2012, showed Irvine and his team reworking the dining room, menu, and kitchen operations at the Broad Street restaurant while pushing the owners to adopt new management practices for staff and service.

According to the blog Food Network Gossip, the owners posted on the restaurant's Facebook page on April 3, 2013 that they had decided to close what they called 'Moss' of Downtown Elyria' for good, with the last day of service set for April 13, 2013, about fourteen months after the episode aired. That closure followed an earlier setback: a local newspaper, the Morning Journal, reported in December 2012 that the family had tried unsuccessfully to sell the restaurant at auction that month. In the Facebook announcement, the owners thanked customers for eleven years of patronage under their ownership and described the closing as the end of a chapter for the staff, several of whom were named individually in the post.

Online commenters at the time offered starkly different accounts of the restaurant's post-renovation service and food, reflecting the same divide in local opinion the show itself had highlighted. The space at 525 Broad Street was later occupied by a different restaurant, Foundry Kitchen and Bar. No evidence was found of Moss' Prime Rib & Spaghetti House, or the Moss family's ownership, continuing to operate anywhere else after the 2013 closure. Census and OpenStreetMap geocoding services could not confirm coordinates for the Broad Street address during this research, though the address itself was corroborated across several independent restaurant-listing sites.