What Happened to Paul's Bar & Bowling After Restaurant: Impossible (FN)?

Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network) built its ninth-season episode "Bowling: Impossible" around Paul's Bar & Bowling, a four-lane bowling alley and bar in Paterson, New Jersey that the Awramko family had operated since 1929, an operation the family has said traces back to a Prohibition-era speakeasy. Chef Robert Irvine arrived to find a business built for an earlier era: worn lanes, a limited and dated bar menu, and a kitchen that had not kept pace with modern food-safety or service standards. Owner Paul Awramko had taken over from earlier generations of his family, and staff and regulars described a neighborhood institution that had been coasting rather than growing for years.

Irvine's team spent the standard 48-hour window and roughly $10,000 renovating the space, refreshing the bar area, addressing kitchen equipment and cleanliness, and giving the bowling side of the business a cosmetic update alongside the food and beverage program. On the operations side, the episode focused on tightening a simple bar-food menu the kitchen could execute consistently, retraining staff on service basics, and coaching Awramko on running both halves of a hybrid bar-and-bowling business rather than treating them as separate operations. As with other themed "Impossible" specials, the episode leaned into the bowling-alley setting as much as the food, framing the rescue around keeping a family-run recreational anchor viable for the neighborhood rather than repositioning it as a conventional restaurant.

The reveal centered on a modernized bar, a workable pub-style menu, and lanes presented as a refreshed but still nostalgic throwback to the venue's speakeasy-era roots. Irvine's narration and interviews with the Awramko family emphasized the multigenerational stakes of the business and the pressure of trying to keep a nearly century-old institution relevant. The episode aired August 6, 2014, as part of the show's run of themed specials that season, which also included golf-course and military-club venues, applying the same rescue format to non-traditional food-service settings.