The Plateau Restaurant That Feeds the City on Its Own Dime

Mama Khan's Abdul Raziq Khan wouldn't have it any other way.

ByJ.P. Karwacki

May 21, 2026 · 4 min read

The Plateau Restaurant That Feeds the City on Its Own Dime

Photograph: Supplied

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Mama Khan

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.

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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.

The Harnoi Waterfall of Abbottabad in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where Khan's family hails from. | Photograph: Fazal Khaliq

Far away in the mountains

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