What Happened to Heat Restaurant & Lounge After Bar Rescue?

Heat Restaurant & Lounge opened in Hollywood, Florida in 2012, run by owners Vin Durand and Vanessa Santos, and initially did well, taking in an estimated $10,000 to $15,000 a week. Competition in the busy Downtown Hollywood nightlife district eventually caught up with the business, which is what brought Bar Rescue's crew in to film "All Twerk & No Pay" (aired March 1, 2015). Despite having "restaurant" in its name, the bar's kitchen sat largely unused, and bartenders had taken to dancing on top of the bar for tips rather than focusing on service.

Jon Taffer's team worked to get the kitchen functioning, taught the bartenders new drink recipes, and carried out a broader renovation, relaunching the business as Club Ele (also referred to as Ele Lounge). Six weeks after the visit, the show reported that happy-hour sales had doubled and late-night sales were also up substantially compared with before the changes. That improvement did not hold: according to Creative Loafing Tampa, the bar was permanently closed by 2015, and a Peruvian and Cuban restaurant called Cabo Blanco has since taken over the address.

The closure came within roughly a year of Jon Taffer's visit, one of several Bar Rescue makeovers in the competitive Hollywood, Florida bar scene that did not sustain their post-rescue gains. No reporting located for this update attributes the closure to any single cause beyond the intense competition among nightlife venues in the immediate area, and no subsequent coverage indicates the Heat or Club Ele names have returned to the address in any form since Cabo Blanco's opening. Of the two Hollywood, Florida bars featured on the show, Heat's roughly one-year post-rescue run was notably shorter than the decade Toucans Oceanside Bar & Grill spent operating down the boardwalk under its own post-rescue name before that business, too, eventually stopped operating.