What Happened to Mt. Ivy Café After Restaurant Stakeout? (Pomona, NY)

Restaurant Stakeout's third episode, "Find the Leader to Follow," which aired March 21, 2012, brought Willie Degel's hidden-camera crew to Mt. Ivy Café, an Italian and seafood restaurant in Pomona, New York. The show's format calls for surveillance footage of unsupervised staff, which Degel then uses to confront an owner and coach fixes to service, staffing, or menu problems. Mt. Ivy Café was one of three Rockland County restaurants featured in the show's early episodes, and its owner, Lucia Ivezaj, later gave one of the more detailed public accounts of how the series was put together: she told The Journal News in March 2012 that producers hired an actor to play a disruptive waiter, coached real staff on how to behave for the cameras, and had cast members change clothes repeatedly to fake the passage of time within a single shooting day.

Wikipedia's article on Restaurant Stakeout describes the series as staged, citing that same 2012 realityblurred.com report, which is built substantially around Ivezaj's account. Mt. Ivy Café's Suite 2 storefront at 14 Thiells Mount Ivy Road no longer operates under that name; a Yelp business listing for the address is tagged "CLOSED," with the page last updated in June 2026. This location should not be confused with the separate Mount Ivy Diner on U.S. 202 a short distance away, which also recently changed hands. No second, independent source confirming an exact closure date was found.