What Happened to Montana Roadhouse After Restaurant Makeover?

Montana Roadhouse was the subject of the fifth episode of the second season of Restaurant Makeover, a series on Food Network Canada and HGTV Canada, which aired on October 31, 2005. Rotten Tomatoes' season listing is unreliable for this episode: the description attached to it names First Class Delite, a small Caribbean-style restaurant that has its own episode, so the listing says nothing usable about Montana Roadhouse, its problems, or what was changed in its menu, decor, staffing or name. No page read describes the relaunch or gives the restaurant's street address.

The series paired a chef with a designer to rebuild a restaurant on a small budget and a tight schedule, and TVmaze's listing for the show says the owners put up half of the funding. Rotten Tomatoes names six chefs among the season's hosts, Brad Long, Rene Chauvin, Lynn Crawford, Massimo Capra, Corbin Tomaszeski and David Adjey, but nothing read says which of them or which designer worked on this episode.

Wikipedia's list of renovated restaurants says Montana Roadhouse later became The Ballroom. Other pages describe a similar sequence at the corner of John and Richmond streets in Toronto's entertainment district. BizBash reported on January 19, 2011 that The Ballroom, a two-floor venue with ten tenpin lanes, arcade games and a dining room, was formerly Montana Restaurant and Bar. A Toronto Star article quoted on the UrbanToronto forum, undated, says The Ballroom was slated to open in mid-December at Richmond and John in a building that had housed a Montana nightclub. BlogTO reported in November 2023 that the bowling venue had been on John Street for 13 years and was opening more locations.

None of those pages uses the name Montana Roadhouse, and no page read ties the television episode to the John Street building, so the connection rests on the Wikipedia note and the similarity of the names.

City of Toronto business licence records list a restaurant named Montana, operated by The Last Best Place Corp at 145 John Street, licensed from 2002-03-18 until the licence was cancelled on 2010-06-18. According to the same records, The Ballroom was licensed at 145 John Street from 2010-09-21 to 2025-01-02, which matches the note in Wikipedia's list of renovated restaurants that the space became The Ballroom.