What Happened to Church Street Diner After Restaurant Makeover?

The Restaurant Makeover episode titled "Church Street Dinner" (the spelling used by the Rotten Tomatoes episode guide) aired on Food Network Canada on 2008-11-10, the sixth episode of the fifth season. The guide gives it the same general line it gives several other episodes that season, about two restaurant industry top guns overhauling a struggling restaurant, so what the episode itself showed is not available from it. The sources read for this entry also do not describe the menu or decor changes, the budget, or the owners at the time of filming.

What they do show is what happened to the diner afterward. Xtra magazine reported on 2010-02-23 that the Church Street Diner at 555 Church St. in Toronto had been closed for months following the makeover and reopened on 2010-02-19. Xtra said it was open daily for breakfast and lunch, serving the same pie and fries as before. That reopening came more than a year after the episode aired. Xtra did not explain why the closure lasted so long. Wikipedia's list of the show's renovated restaurants, which is compiled by editors and was used only as a pointer, likewise says the closure ran more than a year for reasons never made public; no source read adds to that.

On 2010-03-07 Xtra reported that Richard Groom ran the diner with his partner Alfredo. Groom told the magazine that trade was booming and that feedback had been overwhelmingly positive, and he said plans to expand into the upstairs space were already in the works. On 2010-03-09 Toronto Life, in an article by Karon Liu about the Church and Wellesley area, called the diner iconic and said it had expanded. Neither of those two articles mentions the makeover show by name.

Wikipedia's table marks the diner as no longer open and says it has since closed according to its Facebook page. A Google Places search for the name returned The George Street Diner at 129 George St, a different business, which was not used. Because only the street address from the 2010 Xtra report was found, no coordinates are given.

A blogTO restaurant listing for The Church Street Diner at 555 Church St., read on 2026-10-19, carries a "NOW CLOSED" label beneath its heading. The listing shows no date, and its body text still gives opening hours from an earlier review. Xtra reported on 2010-02-23 that the diner had reopened on 2010-02-19, and no source read after that report gives a date for the diner's last day of trading. The Facebook page that Wikipedia's list cites could not be opened by the tools used here.