Queen Mother Café may now span three storefronts and draw crowds for its pad Thai and ping gai, but it started as a tiny 18-seat spot serving simple sandwiches and salads.
When founder Andre Rosenbaum opened it in 1978 at 206 Queen Street West, the idea was to carve out a welcoming refuge inside a mid-19th-century building — a place that felt like the “mother” of Queen West before the strip became what it is today.
More than 45 years later, the restaurant keeps this legacy as much of the staff has worked there for decades. That includes Sivaranjan Nadarajah who took over full ownership of the restaurant this year after buying into one-third of the share in 2021.
Nadarajah has been a part of Queen Mother Cafe family since 1993 when he got a job as a dishwasher while in high school. Of that time, he fondly recalls running back and forth between the café and Rivoli which Rosenbaum, whose partnership team had expanded, also owned at the time.
“They were always kind, and the chef became a good friend almost immediately,” Nadarajah says of Rosenbaum and the ownership team. “They supported me, treated the staff well, and I never felt the need to look for another job.”
As the restaurant expanded to three storefronts and a backyard garden patio, it also became a family operation. Two of Nadarajah’s brothers now work alongside him, joined by longtime staff — including a server who has been with the place for more than forty years.
Chef Noy Phangnanouvong has been working in the kitchen since the Laotian and Thai flavours were first introduced to the menu in the early 1980s. Now, they are some of Queen Mother Cafe’s most recognizable dishes.
“Back in the day, the owners sponsored a couple of people from Thailand because of the war,” Nadarajah says. “They invited them over for a house party, served Thai food, and the owners thought, this is interesting — why don’t we build a menu like this at Queen Mother Cafe?”
That’s how Queen Mother Café accidentally introduced a whole generation of Torontonians to pad Thai. The recipe — along with the beloved ping gai and its old-school veggie burger — hasn’t budged since. That stubborn consistency, the team says, is exactly why the place has held its ground in the neighbourhood for decades.
“We’ve had customers come in after 20-plus years and tell us the ping gai or pad Thai tastes exactly the way they remember,” says Brandon Lopez-Rawson, the front-of-house general manager. “It’s familiar for a lot of our long-time regulars. That consistency Ranjan has kept in the kitchen means people always know what they’re going to get when they walk in.”
Despite the classics, the menu has evolved over the decades, making Queen Mother one of Toronto’s earliest fusion spots. Nadarajah has even added Sri Lankan-inspired dishes, like a vegetarian roti wrap and samosas.
Nadarajah says they’re grateful to the neighbourhood regulars, who, like the staff, have become part of the restaurant family.
“We definitely have some loyalty,” he says. “Regulars come in, and just by looking at them from the kitchen, I can tell what they’re going to order for the family.”
