What Happened to Sebastian's After Kitchen Nightmares? (Los Angeles, CA)

Sebastian's was a pizzeria in the Toluca Lake section of Los Angeles owned by Sebastian Di Modica, a part-time actor who told Ramsay his parents had taught him to cook before he could walk. As shown in the episode, Sebastian had fired a striking number of employees, by his own account close to fifty, and acknowledged that his wife had supplied most of the money to buy the restaurant. That churn left the kitchen and floor staffed largely by recent hires with little grounding in the menu, which the episode suggested compounded the confusion at the pass.

Ramsay nearly walked out at the door: photographs of dishes on the menu triggered his standing rule to avoid restaurants that picture their food, though he stayed anyway. The menu itself was a maze of combinations that confused Ramsay as much as it apparently confused customers. The kitchen served him frozen calamari, a soggy Popeye-style pizza baked in a conventional oven while the restaurant's wood-burning oven sat unused, and an overcooked, underseasoned steak. When Sebastian later boasted to his staff that he had won his argument with Ramsay, Ramsay returned to correct him bluntly, but Sebastian kept insisting on his version of events even to Ramsay's face, continuing to comp meals for his Hollywood regulars while the restaurant's finances deteriorated.

Ramsay's changes simplified the sprawling menu and pushed the kitchen to actually use its wood-burning oven, the equipment the concept was ostensibly built around. The rescue did not last. Newsweek's February 18, 2026 report on Kitchen Nightmares restaurants lists Sebastian's among the Season 1 businesses reported to have closed. A fan site, rescueshowguide.com, reports that the owner reverted to his original menu after the cameras left and that the pizzeria, at 10057 Riverside Drive, shut down in 2008, about a year after the November 2007 broadcast. No later reporting on Sebastian Di Modica was found.