What Happened to Sweet Tea After Restaurant: Impossible (FN)? (Chapin, SC)

The Sweet Tea featured here is the Southern-style restaurant in Chapin, South Carolina that aired in the show's season-two episode "Sweet Tea" on July 20, 2011; a similarly named restaurant, Sweet Tea's Restaurant and Catering in Pineville, North Carolina, appeared in a later, unrelated season-five episode and is a separate business. Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network) visited Sweet Tea, a Southern-style restaurant in Chapin, South Carolina open only about nine months, for the third episode of season two, which aired July 20, 2011. As shown in the episode, owners Christine and Jeffrey Spence had no restaurant experience before buying the business, financed largely by Christine's father's retirement savings; the restaurant was losing about $10,000 a month with only enough money to stay open about one more month.

Robert Irvine found torn carpeting, a dated dining room, canned and frozen ingredients presented as fresh, and food-safety issues including unsafe holding temperatures for the kitchen's macaroni and cheese. Irvine's team retrained the kitchen on made-from-scratch cooking, including a base stock and sauce to replace canned soup and pre-made sides, refreshed the dining room, and rebuilt the sweet tea recipe and drink menu ahead of a relaunch night that drew a line out the door. According to an account carried by the fan site Reality TV Revisited, the owners posted on Facebook in the fall of 2011 announcing they were closing Sweet Tea.

The same fan-site account describes a restaurant called Ava's Copper Pot Bistro as having opened in the same location afterward, receiving good reviews before its closure was reported for 2014 by the same source; that detail has not been independently confirmed. The fall-2011 closure date rests on that single fan-site account rather than a named news outlet or the owners' own statement, but in a September 2026 check, Google's listing for 145 Chapin Rd in Chapin marked the business permanently closed.