When Steve and Kelly Wilson appeared last year in an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service — a FOX reality show in which the celebrity chef lends a hand to struggling restaurants — it appeared to be a victory for their Upper Darby barbecue establishment, Wilson’s Secret Sauce.
In the episode’s final moments, after executing a significant makeover, Ramsay stands with the Wilsons in the restaurant’s dining room, which is brimming with patrons.
“A full house,” Ramsay tells the couple. “Get used to it.”
The reality, though, has apparently been different.
Just a year after Ramsay’s reality-TV glow-up, the Wilsons told Philadelphia magazine this week that they’d elected to close the restaurant and sell the building after a year of declining business.
From the start, the couple’s restaurant was an unlikely endeavor. Their foray into the local food scene came around 2010, when Steve — a former mechanic — began a barbecue catering service from their home. But when demand jumped in the ensuing years, they eventually decided to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant.
Kelly, at least, was not exactly thrilled with the idea.
“[Steve] came home from bowling and asked me if I wanted to open up a restaurant — I literally said, ‘[Expletive] no,’” she said on the episode of Secret Service. “‘I’ve never worked in one, you’ve never worked in one, and I don’t think we could work together all day long.’”
Nevertheless, Wilson’s Secret Sauce debuted in 2018 in Upper Darby, specializing in barbecue dishes while also serving everything from pizza and lobster to egg rolls.
But stress quickly ensued, and when Ramsay came to town last March, he set about transforming the restaurant.
Over the course of the 43-minute episode, Ramsay chastised the couple for everything from food hygiene to kitchen inefficiencies before helping implement a variety of changes aimed at ensuring the restaurant’s survival.
Among the various changes pushed by Ramsay was significantly shrinking the restaurant’s expansive menu, which the couple did, whittling their dozens of menu items down to just 13.
But the Wilsons later told Philadelphia magazine that business slowed after Ramsay’s suggested change, at least in part because customers missed the items that had been cut from the menu.
“We had a lot of customers coming in from day one of the new menu begging us to bring the old menu back,” Kelly Wilson told the magazine. “We were getting lost with his menu, and our menu really worked a lot better.”
While the Wilsons’ sit-down restaurant is set to close, they said they’ll continue the catering service that was once their bread-and-butter, operating out of a shared “ghost kitchen.”