What Happened to Rising Sun Bistro After Restaurant: Impossible (FN)?

Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network) visited the French-themed Rising Sun Bistro in Kalispell, Montana, for an episode that aired December 19, 2012. A preview in the local Daily Inter Lake newspaper reported that the two-day renovation, led by Robert Irvine and his crew, began in September 2012 and concluded with a grand reopening dinner, ahead of the episode's December broadcast. Secondhand coverage summarizing the episode's content described a restaurant carrying about $500,000 in debt, an unfocused kitchen operation, and outdated decor, along with visible strain between the business's co-owners on camera (as shown in the episode).

As is standard for the series, the team reworked the menu, kitchen workflow, and dining room over roughly 48 hours on a budget of about $10,000. The bistro did not recover long-term. According to a fan blog covering the show, Food Network Gossip, the restaurant was eventually listed for sale at $499,000 before its owners chose to close it instead; one of the owners, referred to in that account only as Sally, retired, and the restaurant's chef was reported by the same source to have retired to France as the business wound down.

That blog reported in March 2014 that Rising Sun Bistro had closed, roughly fifteen months after the episode aired. A Yelp listing for the restaurant's 2nd Avenue West address currently shows a permanently-closed status, most recently updated in August 2025, consistent with the business remaining closed. No successor restaurant at the address was identified, and no named news outlet was found to corroborate the closure account beyond the Yelp listing and the fan blog. Kalispell sits in northwest Montana's Flathead Valley, near Flathead Lake and Glacier National Park, a tourism-driven local economy against which the bistro's roughly $500,000 debt load and eventual closure were notable to residents who had watched the business operate for years.