restaurantRestaurant Takeover · Season 1, Episode 5 · Aired September 27, 2012
Sunnybrook
Toronto
The trail goes cold here; we could not verify whether it is still open. The last confirmed sighting we found dates to 2012.
On the show
Season 1, Episode 5 · September 27, 2012 · restaurant
P2 SPINE-FIX: city backfilled from status
What happened after
Described in the show's synopsis as located "at Bayview and Eglinton," Toronto. No business named "Sunnybrook" surfaces at that intersection today; the plaza there (Sunnybrook Plaza) now houses other tenants including a sushi restaurant (Rollian Sushi), unrelated to this listing.
What happened on the show
A dated menu and a tired room had owner Piraba out of ideas at Sunnybrook, a restaurant near Bayview and Eglinton in Toronto. Creative solutions had proved as scarce as paying customers, and the place had drifted into the kind of slow decline that a fresh coat of paint alone would not reverse. Restaurant Takeover treated it as a last-ditch save, sending in its six-day Food Network Canada team, chef Derek Minkensky and designer Cheryl Torrenueva, to force the reinvention Piraba could not manage alone. The format compresses a full reconcept into under a week, and Sunnybrook needed both halves of it: a menu that had aged out and decor that had aged with it. The episode set the stakes plainly, an aging restaurant running low on customers and on the owner's own ideas, with the makeover as the intervention meant to break the pattern before it closed the doors for good.
After the cameras left
Sunnybrook is unresolved, and the trail points toward gone rather than open. No business under that name surfaces today at the Bayview and Eglinton intersection where the episode placed it. The plaza there now houses other tenants, including an unrelated sushi restaurant, with no sign of the original operation or a rename that traces back to it. So current trading could not be confirmed, and the honest last-known signal is an absence: Sunnybrook does not appear to still exist under that name at that corner. We stop short of a hard closed verdict only because no dated closure record turned up, but the evidence leans that way.
Sources
Last checked 2026-07-19.