restaurantRestaurant Takeover · Season 1, Episode 9 · Aired October 25, 2012
Rap's
Its status today is unclear. The last confirmed sighting we found dates to 2012.
What happened after
Caribbean restaurant facing rising competition and "out of date decor" per the show's synopsis. No current business, address, or neighborhood could be identified from available sources within budget.
What happened on the show
Competition was closing in on Rap's. As other Caribbean restaurants opened around it, this one could not keep pace, and the episode was blunt about why: the food no longer measured up, and the decor looked like a tropical storm had rolled through the dining room. That combination, a saturated market and a room that had let itself go, is the kind of slow squeeze Restaurant Takeover was built to interrupt. The Food Network Canada reboot of Restaurant Makeover sent chef Derek Minkensky and designer Paula Velez in on its usual six-day clock to bring some warmth and color back to the Caribbean spot. The task was twofold and familiar: sharpen a menu that had fallen behind newer rivals, and rescue a tropical concept from decor that undercut it. The stakes were survival in a neighborhood that suddenly had better options a few doors down.
After the cameras left
Rap's is among the rows we simply could not resolve. No current business, address, or neighborhood surfaced for it in any source we checked, and the short, single-word name gives almost nothing to search against in a market with several Caribbean spots using similar branding. So the status is unverifiable: current trading could not be confirmed, and no last-known operational signal turned up beyond the episode itself. In a batch where the traceable rooms split fairly evenly between open and closed, Rap's stays in the unknown column, an independent Caribbean restaurant that left too faint a footprint to follow.
Sources
Last checked 2026-07-19.