El Fogon

What happened after

Peruvian restaurant, a fixture on St. Clair Ave W (543 St Clair Ave W) for 16 years; permanently closed. City of Toronto business-license records show the license for El Fogon Restaurant Inc. at that address canceled April 30, 2018.

Closure date on record: 2018-04

What happened on the show

Location was never El Fogon's problem. The Peruvian restaurant sat on a busy, up-and-coming stretch of St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto, the kind of block that should have kept it full, yet most nights it was a place people walked past rather than into. Owners Jorge and Paulo cooked the food of their Peruvian ancestors and shared big plans, but time and money kept boxing them in. Restaurant Takeover brought its six-day Food Network Canada makeover to them, pairing chef Massimo Capra with designer Montana Burnett to close the gap between the restaurant's potential and its empty tables. The reboot of Restaurant Makeover thrives on exactly this setup: a good concept in a good spot that customers somehow keep missing. Here the fix had to be about visibility and execution, giving a passed-over Peruvian kitchen a reason for the neighborhood to finally stop and come in.

After the cameras left

El Fogon is a confirmed closure. The Peruvian restaurant that spent sixteen years at 543 St. Clair Avenue West is gone: City of Toronto business-license records show the license for El Fogon Restaurant Inc. at that address was canceled in April 2018. That gives us a firmer date than most rooms in this batch get, roughly six years after the makeover aired. Sixteen years is a real run, and the restaurant outlasted its Restaurant Takeover episode by a wide margin, but the neighborhood exposure the show tried to convert into traffic did not, in the end, keep the doors open past 2018.