What Happened to Il Papagallo After Restaurant Makeover? (Oakville, ON)

What happened after Restaurant Makeover?

Restaurant Makeover (HGTV Canada / Food Network Canada) featured Il Papagallo, a restaurant in Oakville, Ontario, in an episode that aired on 2008-04-21. The Rotten Tomatoes episode description, which spells the name Il Pappagallo, says the owner, named there as Lou, wanted the restaurant to match the one his mother remembered from visits to Italy. Wikipedia's Restaurant Makeover table credits chef Corbin Tomaszeski and designer Tracy Kundell with the episode.

No source that was found describes the restaurant's problems beyond that single line, the changes made to the menu, decor or staff during the rescue, or the relaunch. The episode listing mentions no new name at the time of the broadcast.

For the years since, only a lead exists. Wikipedia's table marks the restaurant as no longer open and adds a note that it is now Corks Restaurant. No dated page about Il Papagallo or about a Corks Restaurant in Oakville was found: a search for the two names together returned unrelated results, and a second search for a street address returned other Oakville restaurants and real-estate listings. Two pages from the Visit Oakville dining directory that were checked, which present themselves as a selection of the town's more than 200 restaurants, list neither name. The Google Places lookup for the name returned a business named Il Fornello on North Service Road West in Oakville, which has a different name and was not treated as a match.

Because no street address was found, no location is recorded for this entry. It is not known from the sources read whether Corks Restaurant occupies the same space as Il Papagallo, whether it is the same business under a new name, or whether a different operator took over, and no source gives a date for any such change. The Wikipedia note is a lead rather than a dated source.

Wikipedia's table of Restaurant Makeover restaurants, read 2026-10-20, lists Il Papagallo in Oakville as no longer open and notes that its space became Corks Restaurant. A Google Maps search for Il Papagallo in Oakville the same day returned no listing for it.