Fans who binged Landman this fall keep circling back to the same two questions:
- Is The Patch Café a real place? And where, exactly, does Ariana work?
- The basics: who Ariana is and why her job matters
- The Patch Café on screen: the oil patch “third place”
- Ariana’s first shift: the fight that defined her job
- So, is The Patch Café real?
- Where Ariana really works when the cameras roll
- Real‑world inspirations from the actual oil patch
- What happens next for fans and for the building
Is The Patch Café a real place? And where, exactly, does Ariana work?
On screen, the café feels specific. You can practically smell the coffee and fryer oil, hear the oilfield crews arguing over leases in the corner, and see Ariana trying to stay one step ahead of the crowd. Off screen, the reality is more complicated, and a little more interesting than a simple yes or no.
Here is how The Patch Café actually works, in the story and in real life, as of late 2025.
The basics: who Ariana is and why her job matters
Landman is the Paramount+ drama from Taylor Sheridan and Christian Wallace set in the oil fields around Midland and Odessa. Season 1 premiered on November 17, 2024, and ran ten episodes into January 2025. Season 2 followed on November 16, 2025.
The story follows Tommy Norris, a landman and executive at the fictional M‑Tex Oil, as he navigates leases, politics, and blowback from a deadly accident in the Permian Basin.
Ariana Medina enters that world under the worst possible circumstances. As the Landman wiki summarizes it, she is the widow of Elvio Medina, a landman working for M‑Tex who dies in a field accident. Over the first season, she becomes a central figure and a love interest for Tommy’s son, Cooper Norris.
Actor Paulina Chávez, who plays Ariana, has described her in interviews as resilient and shaped by grief. She told one outlet that Ariana’s bond with Cooper grows out of shared trauma after the fatal explosion that killed her husband. By the end of Season 1, coverage of the show notes that Cooper and Ariana are living together and talking about a future built around safer, more ethical drilling.
Ariana’s job at The Patch Café is a key part of that arc. It pulls her out of her house, drops her into the economic engine of the town, and places her in the same room as the people who profit from the system that killed her husband.
The Patch Café on screen: the oil patch “third place”
Within the series, The Patch Café serves as one of the social centers of Landman.
Entertainment site recaps consistently describe it as Tommy Norris’s main hangout. He holds informal business meetings there, unwinds after work, and trades gossip with other landmen. Staff greet him like a regular, which implies a long history inside those four walls.
Several major scenes land there:
- Early in Season 1, Tommy dresses down two representatives from a rival company, TTP, at a table in The Patch. One recap notes that the confrontation sets the tone for how cutthroat the local lease game can be.
- In a later episode, Tommy meets M‑Tex attorney Rebecca Falcone at the café. When she suggests that Cooper had enough knowledge to cause a pump‑jack explosion, Tommy explodes himself. According to TVLine’s recap, he kicks a barstool out from under her in front of a stunned crowd before storming out the door.
- Another episode recap on a fan wiki places Tommy and Rebecca sharing drinks at The Patch when they notice a very young sex worker approaching a customer. They intervene, which leads into a wider conversation about how boom times attract predators and how vulnerable residents can be swept up in the chaos.
Across those scenes, the Patch Café is not just a backdrop. It is where oil money, small‑town routine, and the human cost of the industry intersect in one noisy room.
And it is where Ariana eventually starts working.
Ariana’s first shift: the fight that defined her job
The episode that introduces Ariana’s job at The Patch Café also delivers one of her most memorable moments.
An episode recap carried by AOL lays out the sequence. Ariana applies for a job at The Patch and lands a spot behind the bar. It is a straightforward service job, but for her, it is also a lifeline. She is a young widow trying to support herself without her husband’s paycheck.
The trouble starts almost immediately.
Roughly ten minutes into her first shift, a man at the bar offers to pay her for sex. The recap is blunt about the tone of the scene: the offer is crude and dismissive, as if this is simply how business is done.
Ariana does not quietly swallow it. She throws a drink at him, glass and all. The gesture is more than a splash of liquid. It is a public refusal to accept the kind of harassment that many service workers endure every day.
For a moment, she assumes she has just cost herself her new job. The economic stakes are clear. She needs the money, and she has challenged a customer on her first night.
Instead, a coworker backs her up. As the AOL recap quotes it, that colleague tells her that taking abuse from customers is not part of the job description. The café may be rough around the edges, but there are still lines.
That short sequence answers one of the fan questions directly. In the story, Ariana works at The Patch Café, as a bartender and server. It also tells you a lot about who she is. She is not willing to trade her dignity for a paycheck, even when the odds are stacked against her.
From that point forward in the season, recaps place Ariana at The Patch regularly. She pours drinks, fields comments, hears the latest oilfield gossip, and repeatedly crosses paths with Tommy, Cooper, and Rebecca in that same room.
So, is The Patch Café real?
Fans looking up “Patch Café Midland” quickly discover that reality is layered.
Fictional in the story, specific in the details
First, the simple part: there is no restaurant called “The Patch Café” operating in Midland, Odessa, or Fort Worth.
Sites that track filming locations, such as The Cinemaholic, state this directly. They describe The Patch Café as a fictional establishment created by the production team. Within the story, it is framed as a Midland‑area bar and café frequented by oil workers. In real geography, that specific business does not exist.
The name itself plays off industry slang. In oilfield talk, “the patch” is the field. So the café’s name works as a shorthand for “the place everyone from the patch goes after work.”
But the building is real, and it has an address
The building that plays The Patch Café on screen, however, is very real.
Multiple outlets identify the location as a vacant commercial space at 9840 Camp Bowie West Boulevard, in the Westland neighborhood of west Fort Worth. The Cinemaholic and other location guides trace this address as the exterior and interior set for The Patch during both seasons.
Local reporting in the Fort Worth Star‑Telegram, reprinted by AOL and Yahoo, adds more history. The building is part of a small retail center that the Murrin family built in 1951. Over the decades it held a gas station, hardware store, feed store, and other neighborhood businesses. By the time Landman scouted it, it was mostly empty.
Production designer Charisse Cardenas has said in an interview that her team took that “drab, vacant structure” at 9840 Camp Bowie West and turned it into the roughneck hangout viewers now recognize. They dressed the space with neon, wood, metal, and oilfield props until it felt like a place where landmen might actually argue over royalty checks.
The shooting location has one more key landmark. Directly across Camp Bowie West sits JD’s Hamburgers, a family‑run burger joint at 9901 Camp Bowie West. Local food coverage in the Houston Chronicle reports that JD’s has seen a bump in customers since Landman premiered, many of them fans who come to photograph the Patch Café exterior and then stay for burgers.
A planned restaurant that has not quite opened
After filming wrapped on Season 1, the Murrin family did not just lock the doors and walk away.
In June 2024, the Star‑Telegram reported that co‑owner Philip Murrin planned to turn the former Patch Café set at 9840 Camp Bowie West into a full‑service Texas‑themed restaurant. According to that report, the concept would feature steaks and chicken‑fried steaks, with food prepared by the culinary team from his River Ranch Stockyards event venue.
Next door, at 9812 Camp Bowie West, the family has been building out Rosebuds Picnic Supply, described as an ice‑cream and sandwich shop in the old dining area of Dayne’s Craft Barbecue. The plan, as reported at the time, was to open Rosebuds first, then follow with the restaurant in the Patch space.
A Houston Chronicle story from April 2025, however, noted that while there were plans to open a restaurant in the Patch Café set, “a year later, nothing has materialized.” As of that writing, the space remained in transition rather than operating with a final name and menu.
Late‑2025 dining roundups from the Star‑Telegram, picked up by Yahoo, still referred to “a new restaurant coming in Patch Cafe” at 9840 Camp Bowie West. It appeared on lists of upcoming, not yet open, venues.
So the current status is in between. The building is real. The set dressing exists. The owners have talked publicly about turning it into a working restaurant. But as of late 2025, there is still no open, named business serving customers inside the former Patch Café set.
The Australian “Patch” that confuses search results
There is one more wrinkle for anyone typing “The Patch Café” into a search bar.
The Cinemaholic notes that there is a real café called The Patch in Mullumbimby, New South Wales, Australia. It has no connection to Landman or the Permian Basin. It simply happens to share the name.
So if you see photos of a leafy Australian brunch spot when you look up “Patch Café,” that is not Ariana’s workplace.
Where Ariana really works when the cameras roll
Story and reality overlap most clearly when you look at where the show actually films.
Although Landman is set in Midland and Odessa, reporting by People and other entertainment outlets makes clear that most filming happens in and around Fort Worth, along with nearby towns such as Cresson, Weatherford, Jacksboro, and Dallas.
A detailed breakdown by location‑tracking sites notes that:
- The Babes N’Brew bikini‑barista stand early in the series was constructed as a set along Camp Bowie West Boulevard near Fort Worth.
- The Patch Café set occupies the repurposed building at 9840 Camp Bowie West Boulevard, which production transformed into an oilfield bar and café.
A trailer breakdown for Season 2, published by a TV news site, points out that when you see Tommy talking with Ariana while she works behind the counter at the Patch, the camera is again inside that same Fort Worth building.
So when fans ask “Where does Ariana work?” there are two correct answers, depending on how literally you take the question.
In the world of the story, Ariana works as a bartender and server at The Patch Café, the main hangout for roughnecks, landmen, and lawyers in the fictionalized Midland.
In the physical world, Paulina Chávez performs those scenes at 9840 Camp Bowie West Boulevard in Fort Worth, inside a former 1950s retail space dressed as a café.
Real‑world inspirations from the actual oil patch
Even though the Patch is filmed in Fort Worth, it is clearly influenced by real restaurants in the Permian Basin.
A feature on the Landman.tv blog about food in the series notes that viewers from Midland immediately compared the café to KD’s Bar‑B‑Q at 3109 Garden City Highway in Midland. KD’s has operated since 1997 in a bright red barn‑style building with its walls covered in signs and memorabilia.
At KD’s, customers move through a lunch line, order meat by weight at the pit, then sit at long tables. Oilfield crews, office workers, and landmen all share space. According to that piece, the flow of a busy KD’s lunch rush feels very similar to the way The Patch Café functions in the show, even though they serve different menus.
The same Landman.tv feature points out that:
- The Babes N’Brew stand looks similar to real bikini‑barista outfits like Boomtown Babes Espresso in Odessa, which opened in 2013 and now operates in several oil‑patch cities.
- Fans who travel to see the Patch Café exterior often eat at JD’s Hamburgers across the street. JD’s has leaned into the attention by playing up its connection to the show and even reportedly riffing on Jon Hamm’s name for menu items.
In other words, the Patch Café is a Fort Worth set that borrows its feel from real Midland and Odessa hangouts. Ariana may not actually clock in at KD’s or Boomtown Babes, but the energy of those businesses clearly influences how her workplace looks and behaves on screen.
What happens next for fans and for the building
For now, fans who want to visit Ariana’s “workplace” have a few concrete options.
You can drive to 9840 Camp Bowie West Boulevard in Fort Worth and see the building that plays The Patch Café. You can take photos from the sidewalk and compare them to scenes from the show. Then you can cross the street to JD’s Hamburgers at 9901 Camp Bowie West for an actual meal.
What you cannot do yet, based on public reporting through late 2025, is walk into a fully opened restaurant operating inside the former Patch Café set. The Murrin family has discussed plans, and local papers continue to list a “new restaurant coming in Patch Cafe,” but there is no evidence that it has opened under a stable name and concept.
So when readers of Landman.tv ask, “Is The Patch Café real?” the honest answer is both simple and nuanced:
- The business on the show is fictional.
- The building is real, with a specific Fort Worth address.
- The atmosphere pulls from real Permian Basin spots like KD’s Bar‑B‑Q and Odessa’s drive‑through coffee stands.
- And Ariana’s job exists in that overlap between story and place, where a young widow in a scripted drama serves drinks in a very real Texas building that is still waiting for its next chapter.
