What Happened to Dooney's After Restaurant Makeover? (Toronto, ON)

Restaurant Makeover (HGTV Canada / Food Network Canada) featured Dooney's, a Toronto cafe in the Annex neighborhood, in an episode that aired on 2008-03-31. According to the Rotten Tomatoes episode description, the cafe had been a hangout for film, literary and theater crowds for 25 years, was declining and needed a facelift. BlogTO later described it as a gathering spot for Toronto's literary crowd that opened in 1982 at Bloor and Borden streets.

A Globe and Mail feature on the makeover, which shows no date on the page that was read, named chef Corbin Tomaszeski and designer Jonathan Furlong, with Igor Shamraychuk as contractor. It reported that the owner was concerned about monthly rent of $9,200, and that the renovation included fresh paint, new furniture, a new menu and granite inlays on the tables. The same article mentioned a reopening planned for the following Monday. Wikipedia's Restaurant Makeover table lists the same chef and designer. The exact reopening date and the dishes on the new menu were not found, so they are left out.

What happened afterward comes from BlogTO. A BlogTO roundup of notable Toronto businesses that shut in May, filed under 2018-06 in its web address, reported that the long-time Annex cafe closed for the first time in 2009, reopened in Bloorcourt in 2015, and then closed again. A separate BlogTO article filed under 2018-05 reported that the cafe announced its closing on Instagram, and said the cafe had moved in 2015 to a corner location closer to Ossington. An undated BlogTO restaurant page describes the original Bloor and Borden location as closed and the cafe as resurrected on Bloor just east of Ossington.

Wikipedia's footnote on the table cites a National Post article dated 2008-06-19 about the end of an era for the cafe, and a later update, credited there to CBC, that it reopened further west; the National Post link is dead and neither report was read. A Google Places listing for Dooney's Cafe at 866 Bloor St W, retrieved on 2026-10-19, was marked permanently closed.

The address shown with this entry is that later Bloor Street West location, not the Annex space seen in the episode. The website dooneyscafe.com now serves an unrelated online literary publication, so it is not linked.