Restaurant: Impossible · S3 E8
Mama Lee's Soul Food Restaurant
San Antonio, Texas
It has since closed in 2013.
The short answer
shut down by health inspectors after a failed inspection revealed "continuation of the original cockroach problem" with 42 demerits
What happened on the show
Mama Lee's Soul Food Restaurant in San Antonio got the two day treatment during the show's third season, Irvine working within the modest budget the series sets to steady a struggling soul food kitchen. Because Wikipedia records no summary for the episode, the visit's televised details are not laid out here. The aftermath, though, is vivid and grim: health inspectors later shut the restaurant down after a failed inspection flagged a continuation of the original cockroach problem, tallying 42 demerits. That outcome says plenty about how deep the operational rot ran beneath any cosmetic fix. One note of caution for anyone tracing the name: a separate Mama Lee's Soul Food in Gastonia, North Carolina is a different business entirely, not this Texas restaurant, and the two should not be confused.
After the cameras left
Mama Lee's was shut down by health inspectors around July 2013 after a failed inspection revealed what one account called a continuation of the original cockroach problem, logged at forty-two demerits. The detail comes from a single secondary retrospective, so we hold both the timing and the cause at medium confidence. A San Antonio soul-food restaurant that could not clear its health issues after the rescue closed under the weight of them, distinct from the same-named business elsewhere that has no connection to this episode.
Location
San Antonio, Texas
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Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.