What Happened to Padre Rita Grill After Restaurant: Impossible (FN)?

The Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network) themed special "Paradise: Impossible" brought Chef Robert Irvine to South Padre Island, Texas, to rework Padre Rita Grill, a Tex-Mex restaurant and bar owned by Cathy and Michael Laferty, with Cathy running day-to-day operations for about four years by the time of taping. Irvine found a business trying to combine live music and full food service without doing either consistently well, with a kitchen struggling to keep pace with a bar and entertainment program competing for the same staff and attention. The Gulf-facing tourist location gave the restaurant strong potential foot traffic, but Irvine's team found inconsistent food quality and a cluttered concept were undercutting the advantage of the setting.

The program's standard 48-hour, roughly $10,000 renovation refreshed the dining and bar space and helped the Lafertys rework a menu built around approachable Tex-Mex and seafood dishes suited to a beach-town crowd, while also addressing how the live-music side of the business should be scheduled and staffed so it complemented rather than competed with kitchen service. On-camera coaching focused on helping Cathy Laferty set clearer priorities between the restaurant's food and entertainment identities rather than trying to be equally focused on both at every service. The reveal presented an updated space and a tightened menu meant to let the kitchen keep pace with the restaurant's built-in tourist traffic and live-music draw.

Because South Padre Island's tourist season runs heavily from spring through early fall, Irvine's team also pushed the Lafertys to think about staffing and menu planning that could hold up through slower winter months rather than relying solely on peak-season volume, a common thread across the show's visits to seasonal beach and resort-town restaurants. The episode aired October 6, 2014, and Chef Irvine later returned to the restaurant for a follow-up visit under the program's revisit format, indicating the business remained active for at least some time after the original taping.