What Happened to Runway Cafe After Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network)?

Runway Cafe operated inside the terminal building at Greenville Downtown Airport in Greenville, South Carolina, under owners Mike Bliss and Lem Winesett. Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network) featured the business in the episode "Stalled on the Runway," which aired 2023-02-23, with filming in October 2022. According to a Fox Carolina report on the episode's announcement, the cafe had served the airport and surrounding community for more than a decade under its original owners before the show's involvement. Coverage of the episode said Mike and Lem believed a nearby playground drawing large numbers of children was pulling customers away from the cafe.

Robert Irvine, tasting several dishes on camera, criticized the food's quality and pushed for changes to the menu and kitchen execution as part of the show's standard renovation and relaunch process. After the episode aired, the owners disagreed about the cafe's direction: Mike wanted to sell his stake in the business, while Lem wanted to keep running it, according to a Yahoo News report on the cafe's later closure. Lem ultimately bought out his partner and became sole owner of Runway Cafe. Yahoo News reported that the Greenville Airport Commission chose not to renew the cafe's lease despite its fifteen years of operation, and that owner Lem Winesett submitted a bid to keep the lease but was not selected.

Winesett was quoted saying, "We tried hard to renew our lease." The cafe served its final lunch shift on 2025-05-26, with the lease running through 2025-05-31, Yahoo News reported. The airport said it planned to run food trucks from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily in the space the cafe had occupied, without naming a new tenant for the space. Google Places marked the Runway Cafe listing at 21 Airport Road Extension as permanently closed. The cafe's former website, runwaycafegmu.com, returned a security-block page from the visitor's own internet provider rather than restaurant content when checked on 2026-09-08, which is unrelated to the business's own status.