What Happened to Sweet Tea's Restaurant & Catering? (Pineville, NC)

Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network) visited Pineville, North Carolina for "Sweet Tea's Restaurant and Catering," which aired March 24, 2013. Owners Dana and David Cohen had built a catering business over about three and a half years, then opened a storefront restaurant roughly three years before the show; the episode found a nondescript building that was failing to draw customers, with the couple facing about $80,000 in accumulated losses, and a menu and building identity that Irvine felt did not communicate to Pineville what the restaurant actually offered. Irvine spent part of the episode simply trying to locate the restaurant himself, using its poor visibility from the road as the starting point for the renovation.

His team then updated the exterior signage and dining room so the building would read clearly as a Southern comfort-food restaurant from the road, and reworked the menu around a tighter list of dishes tied to the Cohens' catering strengths, aiming to give Pineville a clearer sense of what Sweet Tea's served and why it was worth stopping for. The two-day turnaround closed with a relaunch dinner for the Cohens, their staff and local guests, centered on the new Southern-food menu and the refreshed, more visible storefront, with the Cohens expressing hope that better visibility and a clearer menu would finally let the restaurant match the success of their catering business. The restaurant operated for roughly 16 months after the broadcast.

According to Food Network Gossip, the owners posted on the restaurant's Facebook page in July 2014 that Sweet Tea's would be closing. A Yelp listing for the address, 9101 Pineville-Matthews Rd in Pineville, still carries a permanently-closed tag as of a May 2026 update, and the restaurant's own website domain is no longer active, returning a domain error when visited. No reopening or successor business at the address has been identified in the sources reviewed for this entry.