It was a decade ago in January when a six-alarm blaze destroyed a 123-year-old heritage building at the corner of Yonge and Gould Streets. It ravaged the home of the tenant most famous to students and alumni from Ryerson University: the Thai eatery, Salad King.
The restaurant reopened nearby a month later at 340 Yonge St. above a Foot Locker. The move was already months in the making, as the heritage building’s wall collapsed a year earlier. The new location didn’t have the same street-level visibility as before, but legions of students and alumni returned anyway.
However, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the restaurant sat empty for the first time. With indoor dining prohibited and universities pivoting to virtual learning, the chatter of diners at the communal tables was gone, sales down 60 per cent and the staff of 50 shrunk to 10. Still, owner Alan Liu is growing the business that he took over from his parents, opening a second location and banking on diners craving a taste of nostalgia.
“We’ve been here since the ’90s and we still see customers who graduated from Ryerson coming back on the weekends with their kids, or make it part of orientation when their kids are now students,” said Liu, 45. “Everyone has their favourites on the menu.”
Part of the charm of eating at Salad King is saying how many chilies go with each order as a measure of spiciness. One chili on Panang Curry with Chicken means mild. Three chilies on Evil Jungle Prince (eggplant, baby corn and other veggies in a chili-lemongrass sauce means it packs a bit of heat. Twenty chilies on Golden Curry with Beef means the dish is basically a dare. My order was the Emerald Green Curry with Tofu, three chilies, five if I had a mango salad to cool my tongue.
Salad King’s menu is itself a scrapbook of memories.
It started in 1981 as a salad spot (hence the peculiar name). The next iteration came in the mid-’80s when three friends from Southeast Asia took over, selling a mishmash of hamburgers, fries, peameal sandwiches, chicken ball fried rice and pad Thai. Liu’s parents, Linda Fung and Ernest Liu, took over the restaurant in 1991, a year after they, along with a 14-year-old Alan, moved from Hong Kong.
Neither of his parents, who are now in their 70s and retired, had experience running a restaurant. Linda was an English teacher and Ernest was an industrial engineer.
“When we came to Canada, my dad wasn’t able to find work in his field. It’s the usual story of being overqualified and not having Canadian experience,” Liu said. “The partners at Salad King decided to sell the place and my parents were like, if we could put some heart into it, maybe we could survive. They didn’t know if it would be a long-term thing, just something to tide them over.”
With no kitchen experience, parts of the old menu and recipes stayed, which explains why a Thai restaurant also serves chop suey, though Liu says Thai chefs have been brought in over the years to refine some of the dishes.
The restaurant expanded with Linda Modern Thai in 2003, a more high-end concept that opened above Salad King. When the building’s wall collapsed, it relocated to the outdoor mall Shops On Don Mills before closing in 2018. Liu says it was a challenging location, as diners in the neighbourhood preferred the old standby of pad Thai rather than the restaurant’s signature dishes of lobster or crispy beef panang developed by its then chef Wing Li. Its chef de cuisine, Chris Jang, is now at Salad King. Those who keep track of the city’s chefs would remember Jang from Queen West’s ramen spot A-OK Foods.
In our interview, Liu was calling from Salad King’s soon-to-open second location at the corner of Queen Street West and McCaul Street. Construction is finished and the stainless steel facade is a nod to what the original location looked like. The place is designed by Sai Leung, who studied interior design at Ryerson and was formerly a partner at the Munge Leung (now Studio Munge) firm that was responsible for Salad King’s steel and orange look in the early 2000s.
A few final permits need to come in before takeout can start. Liu says the kitchen at the new location will allow him to bring back some of the dishes from Linda, and expand the restaurant’s footprint beyond the downtown core.
The city’s food scene made great leaps in the last decade. The site of the burnt-down heritage building that housed the original Salad King is currently the World Food Market, an outdoor international food market with a dozen vendors.
As for Thai cooking, chef Nuit Regular is credited with making the khao soi as popular as the pad Thai when she worked the woks at Sukothai. Her and her restaurateur husband Jeff then expanded with Pai, which focuses on northern Thai cuisine, and the more fine-dining Kiin.
The Regulars’ former business partner Monte Wan split off with Khao San Road, the Bangkok-centric Nana and Favorites, offering Thai BBQ. There are also places like Pii Nong, Issan Der, Jatujak and Kub Khao. Patchmon’s Thai Desserts wows with their pastries and sweets. Eat BKK Thai Kitchen is a local chain with half a dozen locations in the city. The Thailand consulate in Toronto now has a directory of recommended spots (Linda was on the list before it closed).
So where does Salad King fit in when more specific and region-driven Thai places have since opened? Liu says the biggest change to the menu was about five years ago with the addition of a khao soi. Other than that, nothing really has been cut or added — even the not-so-secret Islamic Noodles remains unlisted on the menu (a running joke after Liu’s dad couldn’t figure out how to reprint the menus with the dish on it years ago).
Items like wonton soup and orange beef aren’t synonymous with Thai cooking, but the menu at Salad King does reflect the restaurants’s history, the owners that have come and gone, and the flavours that generations of students and downtown office workers grew up with. Regulars will continue to recite their go-to order — and chili number — with pride.
“When I took over the restaurant, we discussed if we should add more traditional or regional dishes,” Liu said. “I was talking to one of our designers and he said he just really liked the orange beef. That’s been the approach to the menu, even though it’s not necessarily authentic, it’s what our customers want. When you have a dish customers like, be grateful of that and how valuable of a thing it is when people crave it.”
The Mainstays is a weekly series highlighting long-standing restaurants and neighbourhood favourites of Toronto. Food reporter Karon Liu offers recommendations for delicious takeout while also sharing stories of how restaurateurs are faring in the pandemic. Craving something in particular? Email [email protected] with what you’d like to see him write about in the future.
This content was originally published here.