restaurantRestaurant Takeover · Season 1, Episode 1 · Aired August 30, 2012
Village Pizza
Tottenham
Open. The rescue stuck and it continues to operate.
On the show
Season 1, Episode 1 · August 30, 2012 · pizzeria
SOURCING NOTE: Wikipedia's "List of..."/main Restaurant Takeover entry describes this as a Food Network Canada reboot (2012-2013, chef+designer host pairs incl. Lynn Crawford) but has no episode list. TVmaze lists a same-named, same-timeframe, same-format "Restaurant Takeover" tagged network=Food Network (US) with 26 episodes (13+13) and different, non-Canadian-branded restaurant names -- most likely the same show mislabeled by network in TVmaze's database (Food Network Canada content is frequently misfiled), but treat network/country as UNVERIFIED pending a direct Food Network Canada press-kit or IMDb cross-check in P2. City/state not given in source synopses for any episode; needs P2 lookup. | P2 SPINE-FIX: city backfilled from status
What happened after
Village Pizza Restaurant & Baja Luna Lounge, 60 Queen Street South, Tottenham ON, appears actively operating with a maintained Facebook presence (728 likes, 244 check-ins) and current TripAdvisor listing.
What happened on the show
In Tottenham, a small town north of the city, Village Pizza had slid from local favorite to clutter museum. Owner Bernice loved her knick-knacks, and over the years that fondness had smothered the dining room until the decor said more about her collecting habit than her pizza. That was the setup Food Network Canada's Restaurant Takeover walked into, the network's six-day reboot of the old Restaurant Makeover format, in which a name chef and a designer gut and rebuild a failing room against the clock. Here the chef was Corbin Tomaszeski, brought in to straighten out a menu that had wandered in too many directions, and the designer was Paula Velez, whose job was to strip the kitsch and give the pizzeria one coherent look. The tension the episode leaned on was Bernice herself: her attachment to the stuff filling the place was exactly what the makeover had to overcome. Six days, one warped menu, one eccentric owner, and a team trying to find the restaurant buried under the collectibles.
After the cameras left
Village Pizza is one of this batch's clear survivors. As of our latest verification pass the business is trading in Tottenham as Village Pizza Restaurant and Baja Luna Lounge at 60 Queen Street South, with a maintained Facebook presence and a current TripAdvisor listing showing it active. That makes it one of the few Restaurant Takeover rooms we can confirm is still open well over a decade after the cameras left. The lounge branding suggests the concept kept evolving after the makeover rather than freezing in 2012, which is usually the healthier sign in this dataset. We will keep watching the listing, but the signals all point the same way: still open, still serving.
Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.