What Happened to La Cabana After Restaurant Makeover? (Toronto, ON)

Restaurant Makeover, shown on HGTV Canada and Food Network Canada, paired a chef with a designer to overhaul a struggling restaurant on a limited budget, with the owner's funds matched by the production. The episode titled 'La Cabana' aired on 2007-10-15. The only descriptions of it found are two short listings.

TV Guide's season listing describes the work as helping owner Eduardo reach a lifelong goal of running the restaurant. Designer Glen Peloso and the build crew fixed the lighting, the radiators and the chairs. Chef David Adjey persuaded Eduardo to add Peruvian dishes to a menu that had been Mexican. Rotten Tomatoes' synopsis adds one incident: while Eduardo was getting the restaurant ready, it was broken into and left in disarray. Neither listing says what the restaurant looked like before the work, how much money was spent, what the new menu contained or when it reopened.

Wikipedia's list of Restaurant Makeover restaurants includes La Cabana with chef Adjey and designer Peloso. It marks the restaurant as not still open, with no date or source for that mark.

Two similar-sounding leads were checked and set aside. A Toronto venue called Cabana on Polson Street describes itself on its website as a summer waterfront venue, which does not fit a Mexican and Peruvian restaurant. A Globe and Mail review of Eduardo's on Harbord Street credits Restaurant Makeover and chef Adjey with reworking that restaurant, formerly called Latitude, at the end of 2006; that appears to match the separate Latitude Wine Bar and Grill row in Wikipedia's list, not La Cabana.

blogTO published an article in September 2012 on the arrival of Restaurant Takeover as the successor to Restaurant Makeover. It said that one made-over establishment after another eventually shut its doors after the grand reveal, and it named La Cabana, Six Steps, and Cluck, Grunt, & Low among the earlier show's "restaurant casualties." The article gave no closing date for La Cabana, and the page showed no posting date, so the month comes from the article's web address.

The episode itself, as uploaded to YouTube by Be Collective Media, shows the restaurant's door sign reading "La Cabaña Restaurant, Mexican Food", and Eduardo tells the hosts that the space had been a Greek restaurant and then a Mexican one before he leased it. City of Toronto business-licence records list La Cabana Restaurant Inc. at 467 Danforth Avenue, in Toronto's east end, licensed from 2007-02-05 until the licence was cancelled on 2012-05-07; the next licence at that address, issued in July 2012, went to Mara's Gyros & Grill. Yelp's page for La Cabana at 467 Danforth Avenue, checked 2026-10-20, marks the restaurant closed.