What Happened to Dhaba Indian Excellence After Restaurant Makeover?

Dhaba Indian Excellence was an Indian restaurant at 309 King Street West in Toronto, on the King West restaurant strip. A NOW Toronto review by Steven Davey, published 2001-07-19, describes it as an upscale room that had moved from Etobicoke, with chef P.K. Singh Ahluwalia cooking spicy food without ghee, a weekday lunch buffet at $9.95, and 19 steps up from the street door. At the time of that review it was still waiting on a liquor licence.

Restaurant Makeover paired a chef and a designer to overhaul a restaurant on a limited budget, and the Dhaba episode aired on 2007-10-08. Rotten Tomatoes' synopsis says the restaurant needed a new menu and a renovated dining area. According to TV Guide's season listing, owners PK and Taruna worked with designer Brenda Bent, who set out to turn the restaurant into a fine-dining room, while chef Susur Lee taught PK the art of plating. The build crew's Igor dealt with a broken light, a water leak and the stair tiling during the renovation. The sources read give no budget figure, no list of new dishes and no account of the relaunch night.

BlogTO's listing for the restaurant, which has no date on the page, describes it as upstairs, with a tasting menu, a prix fixe option, a la carte dishes and a weekday all-you-can-eat lunch buffet at $12.95. That listing labels the restaurant as closed. A Google Places listing checked on 2026-10-19 lists the business, under the name 309 Dhaba Indian Restaurant of Excellence at 309 King Street West, as permanently closed. Wikipedia's list of Restaurant Makeover restaurants marks Dhaba as still open, but it gives no date or source for that mark, and the Places record and the BlogTO listing both point the other way.

The sources read do not say when the restaurant stopped operating, why, or whether the owners opened another restaurant elsewhere.