companyMystery Diners · Season 8, Episode 1 · Aired October 13, 2014
55 Degree Wine Shop and Link-n-Hops Restaurant
Los Angeles, California
This one did not make it. The business closed.
On the show
Season 8, Episode 1 · October 13, 2014 · restaurant/wine shop
employee-discount abuse sting
What happened after
Wine shop/gastropub pairing in Atwater Village; Yelp Canada listing reads '55 DEGREE WINE - CLOSED - Updated February 2026.'
What happened on the show
Andy Hasroun ran a paired wine shop and gastropub in Los Angeles and sensed the discrepancies at both were linked. Charles Stiles sent mystery diners Rob and Destiney in as a bartender and a customer. As aired, a bartender and a shop cashier had built a small arbitrage between the two businesses, the bartender using his employee discount to buy beer from the cashier, then selling it at the restaurant, under-ringing the sales and splitting the difference, with a free meal thrown in. The confrontation has Andy firing both, neither seeing much wrong with working their discounts. Because Mystery Diners was later accused of scripting its confrontations, this employee-discount sting is best read as broadcast rather than as documented event.
After the cameras left
55 Degree Wine and Link-n-Hops has since closed. A Yelp listing marks the Atwater Village wine shop closed with a February 2026 update stamp, the only clean source found, held at medium confidence in our 2026 pass, with a few directories still showing it as if active. A paired wine-and-food concept winding down years on is ordinary lifecycle, not the residue of a discount sting. Mystery Diners filmed one night of an arbitrage scheme; the closure came later and on its own timeline.
Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.
What is there now
Street imagery via Google Maps. Location approximate.
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