The legendary Toronto franchise Just Desserts is shelving its baking pans and capping its cacao liqueurs for the last time this weekend.

The once-tony nightspot has seen dwindling customers and rising rents gnaw away at its profit margins, reducing the number of outlets from about three dozen in the mid-1990s to one today, franchisee Richard Fernandes told the star.

A harbinger of hip to the late-night dessert scene two decades ago, Just Desserts is also indelibly linked to the notoriously botched robbery that saw the fatal shooting of patron Georgina “Vivi” Leimonis in 1994.

On April 5 of that year, three young men burst through the doors of the original restaurant at Davenport and Bedford Rds. shortly after 11 p.m., demanding cash and jewelry from the 32 patrons. In the confusion that followed, one of the men, Lawrence Brown, hit Leimonis with two shotgun blasts to the chest.

She died in hospital several hours later, the victim of a killing whose senselessness would rob a city of its innocence.

On Monday, the smell of brownie waffles wafted across the tables of the Yonge St. location, the last member of an all-but-extinguished family. There, just north of Wellesley Ave., owner Richard Fernandes served up a Southern Comfort-based coffee concoction, as he has for the past 20 years.

“It was so sad,” he said of Leimonis’s death at the Annex establishment in April 1994, which he was not affiliated with. “But sadly or ironically, it actually catapulted (Just Desserts) into a more popular place. I hate to say it, but that’s the honest truth.”

On the day of the shooting, the franchise was approaching the height of its success, with more than 25 franchises around the GTA and revenue in the multi-millions. It continued to expand through the mid-1990s despite the bloody blemish on its name.

Fernandes was one of several franchisees who sought a piece of the business the year following the tragedy. Since then, he estimates he’s served 700,000 slices of cake and a quarter-million scoops of ice cream.

“Desserts, I just think it’s being saturated now, though. You go to all the fancy restaurants, they have pastry chefs working there, and Rabba, Metro, Loblaws too,” he said.

At about $10,000 a month, the rent isn’t making things easier. “They’re getting too high.

“Now I’m going to just chill,” he added, smiling. “A smart business man knows when it’s time to walk away.”

Several years after the shooting, many franchisees did just that. Meanwhile Jeffrey Givens, the larger-than-life entrepreneur who launched the franchise on its soaring trajectory in 1989, saw lawsuits pile up and ran afoul of Revenue Canada, as well as less forgiving creditors.

Though he owned multiple luxury vehicles, lived in a North Toronto mansion and was known to spend lavishly on meals and parties, Givens’ business empire would ultimately come crashing down. By the time convictions related to the shooting were handed down in December 1999, he was living in obscurity in Tampa, Fla.

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The shock of the explosive incident would leave a permanent stain on his business, which he no longer owned at the turn of the millenium. The crime lodged itself in Toronto’s collective memory, while the checkered investigation and lumbering, sometimes outlandish trial that followed crystallized tensions around race, crime and the justice system in Toronto.

Just Desserts’ familiar neon sign will fizzle out for the last time this weekend, five days after a celebratory bash on Tuesday, starting at 7:30 p.m.