We tracked every restaurant one reviewer visited for five years. Here's how many are still open.

Eat Featured · 7 September 2026

Data as of 7 September 2026. This is a dated study. The figures below are frozen at publication and are not updated as restaurants open or close; a later revision would carry a visible new date.

There's a story people like to tell about food television. Call it the curse: a show turns up, the lines get impossible, the kitchen can't cope, the regulars stop coming, and eighteen months later the place is shuttered. The opposite story gets told too — the bump, the appearance that saves a struggling restaurant.

Both are told constantly. We could not find a published measurement of either. Measuring it takes a complete list of featured restaurants and an ongoing check on whether each one is still trading.

We built that, so we went and looked.

What we measured, and why this one set

Our catalogue holds 3,091 restaurants across sixteen shows and creators. Most of it is not suitable for this question, and it's worth being blunt about why: a catalogue assembled from show archives is biased toward places that still exist. If a restaurant closed in 2012 and vanished from every listing, it may never have entered our records at all. Any survival rate computed across the whole catalogue is flattered by that gap. Our own 2007 cohort shows 83% of restaurants still open nineteen years later, which is not plausible — it's the bias, visible.

So we used the one cohort where we know the capture is complete: every restaurant reviewed by Barstool's One Bite Pizza Reviews between 2021 and 2026. We processed every video in that window, in order, without skipping. If a place was reviewed, it's in the data. That's 1,178 restaurants, and it's the only set here where "how many are still open" means what it sounds like.

Status comes from an automated check against live business data on a rolling schedule, with anything ambiguous reviewed by a person before it's recorded.

The finding

Year reviewed	Restaurants	Still open today	Closed or doubtful	Still open
2021	204	186	18	91.2%
2022	233	215	18	92.3%
2023	229	202	27	88.2%
2024	229	218	11	95.2%
2025	190	188	2	98.9%

Roughly one in eleven closes within five years of being reviewed. Ninety-one percent of the restaurants reviewed in 2021 were still serving four and a half years later.

That is not a curse. It isn't obviously a blessing either. It's a set of restaurants doing considerably better than the folklore predicts.

The comparison everyone will want, and why it doesn't quite work

The number people reach for is H.G. Parsa's Ohio State research, still the most cited real study of restaurant failure: 26% of new restaurants failed in year one, 19% in year two, 14% in year three — about 59% cumulatively over three years. That study alone was notable for finding failure lower than the folk figure of 90%.

Set against 91% surviving four and a half years, the featured restaurants look extraordinary. But the comparison is not fair and we won't pretend it is. Parsa measured new restaurants. We measured famous ones.

That distinction is the most important thing in this article. Shows and creators do not pick randomly. They pick places that are already established, already loved, often decades old, with a queue out the door before any camera arrived. The population is pre-selected for durability.

So the honest reading is not "being on TV helps you survive." It's:

Restaurants that get featured were already unusual survivors, and they mostly keep surviving. The camera doesn't appear to change the trajectory much in either direction.

Which is a duller headline than the curse, and considerably more likely to be true.

What closes, and when

Separately from the survival rate, we've been researching the confirmed closures in our archive — finding the date and a published source for each. We have 62 with a closing date, and 60 of those with a published source.

Only some of those dates are precise. Where a report gives only a month or only a year, we store that precision rather than inventing a day, which means most of the archive can't be used for day-level arithmetic without quietly turning a placeholder into a fact. Restricting to the 34 closures where a source states an exact day and we also have an exact air date, the average gap between a restaurant's first appearance and its closing is 2,590 days: 7.1 years.

That figure describes only restaurants that closed. It is not a life expectancy — the ones still trading aren't in it, and most of them are. Read it as: when a featured restaurant does go, it usually goes long after the episode aired, not because of it.

The range is wide:

Hob Nob Hill, San Diego — 6,364 days. Seventeen years after the cameras, and eighty-two years after it opened.
Nic's On Beverly, Los Angeles — 114 days. Under four months.

And the reasons are mostly ordinary. Owners retired. Leases ended. A landlord wanted the building. A flood took the site and the insurance didn't cover a return. One burned down while still trading, after roughly a century in business. Very few of them read like a restaurant crushed by attention.

What we can't tell you

Whether the appearance caused anything. We have no counterfactual. Comparing featured restaurants to unfeatured ones would need a matched sample we don't have.
Anything reliable about older cohorts. The pre-2021 capture bias described above is real and we won't launder it into a chart.
Whether this generalises past pizza. The clean cohort is one reviewer with one specialism. Applying it to steakhouses or barbecue is a guess.
Anything national about the closure timings. The dated closures are heavily Californian — 43 of 62, across only fourteen states. That is not a fact about restaurants; it is a fact about which local food press is dense enough that a closure gets written up and can be sourced. Closures elsewhere are underrepresented in the dated set precisely because they are harder to document, so treat the 7.1-year figure as descriptive of what we could verify, not of the country.

We'd rather publish a narrow finding that holds than a broad one that doesn't.

Method, for anyone who wants to check it

Population: every restaurant reviewed by One Bite Pizza Reviews, 2021 through 2026, captured from the channel's own upload history in full. 1,178 venues after de-duplication of repeat visits.
Status: current operating status from live business data refreshed on a rolling schedule by closure risk, with a human reviewing anything the automated check flags as uncertain. "Closed or doubtful" counts anything not confirmed open, so it errs toward pessimism.
Closure dates: researched individually from local news, food press, or the business's own announcement. Listing-site status flags were not accepted as evidence. Where only a month or a year is reported, we store the precision rather than inventing a day — and any calculation that needs an exact day uses only the rows that have one. A date we could not source at all is left empty rather than estimated, which is why the archive holds closures with no date beside it.
Corrections made before this piece was circulated: a full re-sourcing pass on the archive found two venues with dates no source supported (removed), one with the wrong year (corrected from 2023 to 2019), three with a day-precision date that only a month could be defended (reduced), and sixteen with no source that now have one. The figures above reflect the corrected archive.
Cut-off: 7 September 2026.

Every restaurant behind these numbers is on the map at eatfeatured.com, with its own page, its verdict, and the date we last checked. If you think we've got one wrong, tell us — the correction is the product.

Eat Featured maps restaurants featured on food television and by food creators, and tracks whether each one is still open. No restaurant pays to appear, and none can pay to have a closure notice removed.