By the time it was closed by Toronto Public Health on September 22, 2010, there was no restaurant in the city with a recent health record as bad as the Green Room's. After the restaurant failed its health inspection for the fourth time in two years, Toronto Public Health had enough, bringing the Annex staple before a Toronto Licensing Tribunal hearing. There, the Green Room's young new owner, Dat Nguyen Au, was accused of operating a "front" for the Green Room's longtime previous owner, and the Green Room's licence was revoked, keeping it closed. (Fittingly, the licence that preceded Au's was "completely covered in cockroach feces" when health inspectors discovered it.)

Five months after being shut for what looked like the last time, though, at least one person claims to have been inside a newly reopened Green Room, and the restaurant has just passed a health inspection.

Here's what we know, and don't know, so far:

It's not yet clear who the new owners are

No new business licence is yet publicly listed for the Green Room. (It being the Sunday of a holiday long weekend, the Municipal Licensing & Standards offices, which handle such things, are closed. So are Toronto Public Health's.) There are no licences listed as being in Dat Nguyen Au's name, or in the name of either William Pham or Noc Elissa Pham, the father-daughter team that the City long suspected of being the Green Room's real owners.

Ian McPhail, the lawyer who represented Au at the tribunal hearing is no longer representing the Green Room's owners, he tells OpenFile, and so he doesn't know, either. "I was retained for that hearing, but that was all." Did McPhail have any involvement after the October 14 hearing? "None whatsoever." [UPDATE: February 20, 2011, 9:55 p.m.: A woman who gave her name as Jessie Tong called OpenFile from the Green Room tonight to arrange a meeting, and told us that she was the restaurant's new owner. She said that she took over the restaurant "this year." Earlier today, BlogTO's Derek Flack got inside the Green Room and met with Tong, but had some doubts that she's actually in charge.]

On the afternoon of Sunday, February 20, the Green Room wasn't open

OpenFile reporter Steve Kupferman, who arrived not long after 1 p.m., says:

I peeked through a dusty window and saw a bar that looked very much as though it had recently been in use. There were some pint glasses in a dish drain, and a roll of brown paper towels on the counter. Chairs were neatly stacked on tables. From what I could tell, the interior looked more or less as it did last time I was there.

Inside the little alleyway where the entrance is, there was a little bulletin board with a DineSafe "green" card posted on it, along with the Green Room's couple of press accolades. The green card was dated February 17.

The main door was locked, so I knocked. No answer. I went to another door, which I assume was a kitchen door, and knocked. No answer.

The only living things in the vicinity were a few pigeons. There were no hours of operation posted anywhere.

Photographer Nick Warzin was there an hour later, and saw much of the same:

OpenFile's calls to the Green Room on Sunday afternoon were not answered, and a voicemail left was not returned. (A generic message greets callers at the restaurant's number: "Hello. No-one is available to take your call. Please leave a message after the tone.") They didn't pick up for BlogTO, either. [UPDATE: February 20, 2011, 4:26 p.m.: BlogTO's now reporting that they spoke to an employee, and that the Green Room will be open "around 6 p.m. tonight." UPDATE: 10:10 p.m.: …and it was. John Michael McGrath, who sometimes contributes to OpenFile, tweeted his way through re-opening night.]

Someone says that the Green Room was open on the night of Saturday, February 19

"THE FUCKING GREEN ROOM IS OPEN," a user named frenris scrawled in a post on Reddit very late on Saturday night. They continued:

I'm kidna fucked up right now.

Some of my fellows and myself; venturing forth on this bold night, after a sojourn at the lab [The Labyrinth Lounge, around the corner from the Green Room] (which we found adequate to our tastes), discovered afterwards, that instead of the abandonment of the locale in the general vicinity of the previous known green room, there was a new greenroom sign.

After a brief intermission, as well as the witness of a paper sign on the door. (The previous fabulous sign being upon the brick above the imfamous alley entrance. Instead of on the door. Like this 2nd, much shabbier sign). They had changed the decor. No more christmas lights. An employee admitted that more light would prevent one from seeing dirt. There are now brighter lamps and a bunch of greek statues, paintings, and assorted cultural artifacts. Supposedly this was the second night open. It seemed kind of cool. There was an older asian guy drinking martinis by himself. My friends hypothesized he was the owner.

I hope this was informative. I tried to link to a reference, endeavoring to milk karma, and ti orivude more solid information, but I couldn;t find anything on google that matcghed what I was trying to say.

BUt that doesn't matter. Cause I was just at the green room. And they are once again open. And it's da truth.

(All spelling and punctuation are as they were in the original.)

In a private message, frenris, who didn't provide their real name, told OpenFile that they shared a pitcher of beer inside with their friends at the end of the night. Frenris was right about at least one thing, too: there is a new sign (above). The old one looked like this, and had not been replaced as of at least early January.

If it is open, it's not off to a great start.

While the restaurant passed its Toronto Public Health inspection on Thursday, February 17, inspectors cited the restaurant for eight infractions on their previous inspection, the first listed since the restaurant was closed last year. The infractions, noted on February 15, include "fail[ing] to provide adequate pest control" and "fail[ing] to provide hand washing supplies." Both are "Significant" infractions, but neither would by themselves necessitate shutting a restaurant down, or preventing one from opening. (You can view the restaurant's DineSafe Establishment Inspection Report online here. Because the inspection reports—the ones that the public can see online—are cleared once an establishment changes owners, its previous inspections and infractions are not listed.)

Calls to Toronto Public Health were not returned on Sunday, and may not be until the long weekend is over. But allowing the Green Room to reopen, whether it was under new ownership or not, would not have been an easy decision. At the October tribunal hearing, the City's lawyer, Rosanne Giulietti, argued that the new name on the restaurant's licence was little comfort. The "real owner," she said then, was still William Pham. "We don't have to wait until someone dies," she argued, to close it down for good.