Portugril

What happened after

Portuguese churrasqueira restaurant at 1733 Eglinton Ave E, North York/Toronto, open since 2006. Permanently closed per blogTO, June 2022.

Closure date on record: 2022-06

What happened on the show

Churrasco ran in Joe's blood. His mother and grandmother had handed him the Portuguese grilling tradition he felt duty-bound to keep alive in Canada, and Portugril, his North York churrasqueira in Toronto, was where he carried it. Keeping it open cost him: he had taken a second full-time job to prop the restaurant up, and his daughter Maria, who managed it, offered up fifteen thousand dollars of her own savings for the overhaul it badly needed. As the series finale, this episode put a whole family legacy on the line, Joe's, Maria's, and an infant granddaughter's future along with it. Restaurant Takeover sent chef Corbin Tomaszeski and designer Paula Velez in on the six-day Food Network Canada clock, the reboot of Restaurant Makeover, to try to save a failing restaurant that meant far more to its owner than a business. The stakes were heritage and household both, riding on one week of work.

After the cameras left

Portugril outlasted its makeover by nearly a decade before closing. The Portuguese churrasqueira at 1733 Eglinton Avenue East in North York, open since 2006, shut permanently in June 2022 according to blogTO, giving us a firm and relatively recent date. That is a real run: the restaurant Joe worked a second job to keep alive survived roughly nine years past its series-finale appearance. In a family business built on inherited tradition, that longevity meant something, even if the ending eventually came. The legacy the episode framed as the whole point held on far longer than the average room the show tried to rescue.