Beets Café

What happened after

Raw-vegan cafe on West 5th St; closed roughly June 2014 (after ~5 years) due to a lost lease.

Closure date on record: 2014-06

What happened on the show

Sylvia Heisey spotted two of her secret raw-food recipes online and suspected her own staff of selling them at her Austin cafe. Charles Stiles sent mystery diners Holly, Paul and Robin in as a waitress and customers. As aired, a head prep cook sells one of the recipes to a diner for sixty dollars, a waitress lies to customers about the health benefits and calls herself a co-owner, and another forges tickets to dodge the house rule that staff pay for their own mistakes. The confrontation has Sylvia firing the recipe-seller and the fake co-owner and sparing the third. Because Mystery Diners was later accused of scripting its confrontations, this recipe-theft sting is best read as broadcast rather than as verified.

After the cameras left

Beets Café has since closed, and the reason was mundane. The raw-vegan cafe on West 5th Street closed around June 2014 after roughly five years, having lost its lease, per its listing and Eater coverage in our 2026 pass. A lost lease is ordinary business fortune, not the residue of a recipe sting. A small independent reached the end of its run when the space slipped away, which is a far more common ending than anything a hidden-camera night could cause.