restaurantRestaurant Takeover · Season 2, Episode 10 · Aired October 30, 2013
Simply Thai
Vancouver
The rescue did not hold; it later closed.
On the show
Season 2, Episode 10 · October 30, 2013 · Thai restaurant
P2 SPINE-FIX: city backfilled from status
What happened after
Thai restaurant and wine bar at 1211 Hamilton Street, Vancouver. Yelp's own listing title reads "SIMPLY THAI RESTAURANT - CLOSED - Updated July 2026"; direct fetch of the Restaurant Guru listing confirms an explicit "permanently closed" tag on the page itself ("The spot is permanently closed."). OpenTable/Restaurant Guru search snippets that appeared to show it as active were stale/misleading -- the direct-fetch check overturned that initial read.
What happened on the show
When Simply Thai opened, it was the first Asian restaurant on its Vancouver block, and for a while that novelty was enough. A decade on, the neighborhood's food and nightlife scene had exploded past it, and the once-pioneering Thai restaurant and wine bar had faded into just another run-down spot among many. Restaurant Takeover arrived to force the reinvention owner Ooy had resisted. The Food Network Canada reboot of Restaurant Makeover sent chef Corbin Tomaszeski and designer Cheryl Torrenueva in on the six-day clock, and the episode's real subject was Ooy herself: a traditional owner attached to how things had always been done, being pushed toward changes she did not want. The question the show raised was how hard the team could press before the pressure backfired, a last-ditch save that risked pushing a stubborn proprietor past her breaking point rather than saving her restaurant.
After the cameras left
Simply Thai is a confirmed closure, and it doubles as a cautionary verification tale. The Thai restaurant and wine bar at 1211 Hamilton Street in Vancouver is permanently closed: a direct check of its listing pages surfaced an explicit closed banner, even though some search snippets initially suggested it was still taking reservations. Those stale signals were misleading, and only fetching the pages themselves settled it. So the honest, verified status is closed. The first Asian restaurant on its block outlasted its makeover for a time, but the scene it once led kept moving, and eventually the room could not keep up.
Sources
Confidence: high. Last checked 2026-07-19.