Le Restaurant Plateau Qui Nourrit la Ville À Ses Propres Frais

There's a wall inside the small Pakistani restaurant Mama Khan, where meal vouchers hang for anyone who needs one, no questions asked. Abdul Raziq Khan would like that wall to stay full. Meanwhile, five dollars buys a meal for a stranger.

Khan is 30 years old, a Park-Ex kid, and constitutionally incapable of running a restaurant that only serves food in a transactional fashion. Since opening Mama Khan with his mother and brothers as a ghost kitchen in 2021— during what he cheerfully describes as "probably a suicide attempt" of a moment to start a business—he has built both a community institution and simple a place to eat.

There's the halal soup kitchen that runs Tuesday through Friday from noon to two. The weekly Friday meal run to the Old Brewery Mission, where his team distributes around 140 meals a week. The warming centre he opened on a -35°C morning in January where he handed out free chai, and inspired twelve other Montreal restaurants to follow suit.

None of it was planned. "It started with one meal," he says. "Then 20 meals, 30 meals. And then I realized I'd given over a thousand meals and I thought, okay, let's start a foundation." The Madinah Foundation is now over a year old at the time of this writing and has partnered with international relief organizations; its latest fundraiser raises proceeds from samosa sales to go to Lebanon, with donations being matched up to $8,000.

Mama Khan is a giver.

Far away in the mountains

The through-line, if you trace it back far enough, runs to a village in the mountains outside Peshawar, in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where Khan's family hails from. He's been five times in his life, trekking out two hours from the city to a village that sits on top of the mountains.

"It's cold air, you see everything laid out in front of you, there's livestock, you see the animals, you see how they eat the grass. You grow what you eat, you plant what you eat. Everyone's a community, everyone tries to help each other out.

“I think that, seeing it all firsthand, is the reason why when I come back that I try to replicate the same type of environment in my restaurant. We try to be hospitable, we try to take care of people. If there's any problems around Montreal, we try to give out meals and help people out. I think that's where it came from."

Raison d'être

The restaurant’s current address, a bigger space the family moved into in 2023 after outgrowing their original spot two doors down, has good bones. Brick walls, a sous-sol that’s cool in the summer, and a terrasse out back.

His mother, Misraj Khan, is the head chef, the name above the door, and the reason any of this exists. She came to Canada at eight years old, raised Abdul in Park-Ex, and somewhere along the way became known simply as Mama Khan through her work as a home care nurse for the elderly.