What Happened to Poco's on the Boulevard? (Kansas City, MO)

Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network) visited Poco's on the Boulevard, a Mexican restaurant at 3063 Southwest Boulevard in Kansas City, Missouri, for an episode that aired November 21, 2012. The restaurant had been founded by Lorenza "Poco" Gutierrez, and by the time of filming her family had taken over day-to-day operations following her death. As is standard for the series, Robert Irvine and his crew spent about 48 hours and roughly $10,000 renovating the restaurant's kitchen, dining room, and menu before a relaunch dinner for the owners and the surrounding Southwest Boulevard neighborhood.

Coverage from the Kansas City alternative newsweekly The Pitch shows the restaurant continued operating on Southwest Boulevard for more than two years after the show aired. In 2015, The Pitch reported that the Southwest Boulevard building had been sold and the new landlord wanted to raise the rent, prompting longtime operator Claudia Endicott -- who had run the restaurant since Gutierrez's death -- to close that location and move a scaled-down version of the business, serving breakfast and lunch only, to a smaller storefront at 240 East Linwood Boulevard, near a Kansas City Costco. The former Southwest Boulevard space was later taken over by a pizza chain, Minsky's, according to Feast Magazine's coverage of the changeover.

The relocated restaurant operated under the name Poco's Mexican Cuisine at the Linwood Boulevard address. A Yelp business listing for that address currently shows a permanently-closed status, last updated in April 2026, indicating the business is no longer operating there either. No further reporting on an exact closure date for the Linwood Boulevard location was found during this research, and no successor business at that address was identified. Because the same owner both renamed and relocated the business before its eventual closure, this record treats the outcome simply as closed rather than as a rename or new-ownership case.