What Happened to The Empress Restaurant After Restaurant Makeover?

The Empress Restaurant was the subject of the twelfth episode of the second season of Restaurant Makeover, a series on Food Network Canada and HGTV Canada, which aired on February 6, 2006. Rotten Tomatoes' episode page carries a one-line synopsis: best friends pooled all their resources and bought an aging cruise ship called the Empress. The page lists Food Network Canada as the network but gives no location for the vessel, no word on where it was moored or what it served, and nothing about the owners' difficulties, the changes made to the menu, decor, staffing or name, or the relaunch.

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, watched the demolition and returned to see the finished room. The Rotten Tomatoes episode page 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 the Empress.

Wikipedia's list of renovated restaurants marks the Empress Restaurant as still open, with no note, no date and no address. No other page read mentions the Empress as a restaurant, and no dated hours, review, listing or news item was found, so the claim on the Wikipedia list is not corroborated. A Google Places lookup for the restaurant's name returned no business that could be matched to the ship restaurant.

A Google Maps search for The Empress Restaurant in Toronto, checked 2026-10-20, returned no listing for it, open or closed, and web searches the same day found no website, directory page or recent review for the restaurant featured on Restaurant Makeover in 2006.