Since opening his small family-run restaurant with his mother back in 2021, Abdul Raziq Khan says he’s worked hard to create a sense of community centred on giving back.
“We’ve always been standing up for food insecurity in the Island of Montreal,” Khan said of his restaurant Mama Khan, explaining different initiatives the popular eatery in the city’s Plateau-Mont-Royal borough participates in to feed the hungry.
This commitment could help explain why he was shocked by the events that transpired at his restaurant on Christmas Eve, when part of a group of eight diners, who said they were from out of town, skipped out on their bill after complaining it was too expensive.
“It’s the first time ever that customers were getting up and just leaving without paying,” Khan said, adding the unpaid portion of the tab totalled $160.
Paying it forward at Montreal’s Mama Khan restaurant
Khan said his immediate concern was for the safety of his staff and making sure his waiter was OK.
“My waiter is 19 years old, he’s a young kid,” Khan said, adding it’s intimidating facing off eight grown men. “I told him a couple times, step back, call the cops and let them deal with it. We can’t be superheroes.”
While $160 might not seem like a lot to some, on a day where you make only $1,000 in sales, $160 is significant, according to Khan, especially during the slower winter months.
“Every little dollar we make counts,” he said, “We don’t have grants. It’s all the money I make in my restaurant, I give back in my community.”
Khan’s initiatives include running a soup kitchen from noon to 2 p.m., Tuesday to Friday, and going out into the community every Friday at different locations to hand out free meals.
At his restaurant, which serves Pakistani cuisine, clients can come in and pay a meal forward to the next person who comes in and needs it.
After last week’s incident, Khan says he’ll be looking at putting in place new procedures to prevent something similar from happening again.
When CBC caught up with him on Monday, his day off, he said he was on his way to file a police report.
In the meantime, however, Khan said he wanted to warn other restaurant owners to be careful and decided to post a video of the incident on social media.
“We have to make sure that we stand together, because if it happened to me, it can happen to somebody else,” Khan said.
The video was viewed thousands of times and Khan said he felt buoyed by the messages of support.
One of those messages was from Shahryar Ahmed, who offered to foot the $160 bill himself.
Ahmed, whose younger brother was a friend of Khan’s in high school, said paying the tab felt like the right thing to do.
“It was just really an act of kindness,” he said. “And more so, I just felt that restaurant owners should not be put in that situation especially in the holiday times.”
Ahmed hopes his gesture will inspire others to seek out ways to turn negative situations into more positive ones.
According to Khan, it already has.
He said he’s received other donations, with one person donating $1,000 and another even adding a tip for his waiter with their contribution.
“We’re going to reuse that money to give back to the community,” Khan said, adding that with $1,000, he can serve up 200 meals to those in need.
Khan said he was thankful for all the help and remarked how the incident helped shine a light on Mama Khan’s community work.
“I can’t wait to share this with my mother too, she’s going to be very happy,” he said.
