What Happened to Hamar Weyne After Restaurant Makeover? (Toronto, ON)

Restaurant Makeover (HGTV Canada / Food Network Canada) featured Hamar Weyne, a Toronto restaurant, in an episode that aired on 2008-04-07. The Rotten Tomatoes episode description is a single line: the owner, named there as Ali, learns that running a restaurant is hard. Wikipedia's Restaurant Makeover table credits chef Corbin Tomaszeski and designer Tracy Kundell with the episode and gives the location as Toronto.

No source that was found describes the restaurant's problems in more detail than that line, the changes the chef and designer made to the menu, decor or staff, or how the relaunch went. Wikipedia's table lists no earlier name for this restaurant, and the episode listing mentions no new name, so no name change is described here.

For the years since, the evidence is thin and partly ambiguous. An undated ByBlacks directory page lists a Hamar Weyne Restaurant, Somali Cuisine, at 296 Rexdale Blvd in Etobicoke. A Google Places lookup for that address, run on 2026-10-19, returned a business named Xamar Weyne Samosa Village, marked permanently closed. The two names look like spelling variants of the same Somali name, so they may belong to one business, or one may have followed the other at the address, but neither page says which, and neither is dated to the period of the broadcast.

BlogTO's roundup of Somali restaurants in Toronto, filed under 2019-01 in its web address, covers five other restaurants and does not mention Hamar Weyne; that omission says nothing by itself about whether the restaurant was operating. Wikipedia's table marks the restaurant as still open without giving a date or a source, and no 2026 evidence of hours, online ordering or reviews was found for a restaurant of this name that could be tied to the episode. The table is a lead rather than a dated source.

City of Toronto business licence records list a series of Somali restaurants at 296 Rexdale Boulevard: Hamar Restaurant from 2004, New Hamarweyne Restaurant from 2005-10-27 and Hamar-Weyne Somali Cuisine, licensed from 2008-03-11, a month before the episode aired, until its licence was cancelled on 2010-06-11. According to the same records, a different company ran Xamar Weyne Samosa Village at the address from 2010 to 2018, and Tikka King has held a licence there since 2024-03-02.