Mohamad Fakih leads a tour of a Paramount Fine Foods restaurant and stops to sharpen a long knife and slice beef shawarma from a spit.

The founder and CEO of the growing chain of Middle Eastern restaurants with a halal menu is smiling broadly, clearly happy that fate has brought him to this kitchen in the Liberty Village location in Toronto.

In a few hours the kitchen will fill with staff, including Syrian refugees that he hired to give them a start in Canada.

Fakih, 45, oversees more than 40 locations worldwide, mostly with franchise partners. The chain, which employs more than 1,000 people, includes a commissary, gourmet butcher shop and a new Middle Eastern-style sandwich franchise.

But Fakih has also made a mark through his charitable acts.

He covered the funeral costs for the six worshippers who were slain in a mass shooting in January at a Quebec City mosque. And he has set a goal of hiring 100 Syrian refugees; so far 80 are working in his restaurants.

Fakih, who trained as a gemologist, entered the restaurant industry by chance a decade ago. Last year, his businesses saw nearly $70 million in sales. He lists his current net worth at $50 million. In November, he was named business leader of the year by Toronto Region Board of Trade.

He now lives in Mississauga’s tony Gordon Woods community, and likes his toys, including a custom-made motorcycle called “the Money Shot” he keeps parked inside his Etobicoke head office. But he cringes at the label millionaire — “please don’t call me that, I hate it.”

Despite the success, Fakih still can’t escape the sting of bigotry. He grew up in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. In Italy and then Canada, he has faced discrimination as an Arab and Muslim, and he has been racially profiled at airports.

That’s what happens when your name is Mohamad and you were born in Beirut, he says stoically.

As recently as 18 months ago in Poland, on his way to Dubai with his family, Fakih was questioned at length by a border agent. The official wanted to know: did he donate to any mosques?

“People aren’t ashamed of crossing lines with any Muslim, regardless of how respectful you are, how humane you are, regardless of how good you are to your community,” he says.

On Jan. 29 six people were killed and nearly 20 others were wounded in a mass shooting at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec.

After Fakih heard about the tragedy, he spent tens of thousands of dollars to cover funeral and burial costs of the worshippers killed in what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a terrorist attack. He also donated money toward the repair of the mosque, which was damaged by gunfire.

Aside from the funeral costs, Fakih’s “generous donation meant that this money could be used for additional support for the victims’ families and those injured and affected by the attacks,” said Reyhana Patel, a spokesperson for Islamic Relief Canada, an international aid and development charity in the Muslim community that disbursed the money for the funeral and repairs.

Fakih is proud of his faith and is passing down his values to his three young sons, Adam, 2, Karim, 10, and Emad, 12. But the boys were devastated by the attack, and one expressed confusion, saying he thought Canadians liked Muslims. (Alexandre Bissonnette, 27, of Quebec is accused in the slayings.)

Fakih says incidents like the racial profiling at airports and the mosque shootings are teachable moments he uses to inform his sons about discrimination.

After the massacre, “I said (to his eldest son) we have less than 1 per cent of the Muslim community we call ISIS.

“They do a great job at making our reputation bad. They (do) a horrible job representing how Muslim they are.”

Similarly, the accused mosque shooter represents the tiny fragment of Canadians that is anti-Muslim — not the majority, Fakih told his son.

Fakih doesn’t harbour racial bitterness. Intolerance and bigotry towards Muslims is fuelled by “bad information” and stereotypes that non-Muslims hold toward the religion, Fakih believes. That type of thinking is behind U.S. President Donald Trump’s travel ban, he says.

Fakih has taken the opposite approach. He is proud to say he has people from numerous backgrounds in his restaurant operation, whether they are suppliers, employees in his corporate office or kitchen staff.

“All Canadians are welcome to work here. If I can learn how to make pasta, someone can learn how to make shawarma.”

Fakih has become good friends with his lawyer, Yehuda Levinson, a Hasidic Jew who helped Fakih obtain a visa to work in Canada nearly 20 years ago. Fakih says he has a lot of faith in Levinson, and depends on him, recently asking him to be a trustee for a personal family matter.

“I was very touched,” Levinson recalls. “He was looking for somebody he could really rely on, 100 per cent. (Mohamad) said ‘I just don’t know anyone better than you to do this.’

“Mohamad approached me as a friend, not as a lawyer. He didn’t need a lawyer to do this.”

Levinson, 65, a litigator who practises immigration and family law, says the two appreciate each other’s differences.

“We’re really an example for everybody else that there really doesn’t need to be conflict between Jews and Muslims,” Levinson says.

“And we like to think we exemplify what’s possible in Canadian society.”

In young Mohamad Fakih’s home in Beirut, “it was not OK to say no to anyone who needed help.” His parents — father Abdallah, now 82, and mother Nabiha, 75 — preached tolerance and respect to Fakih and his siblings.

Abdallah and Nabiha raised Mohamad and his two brothers and four sisters in a three-bedroom house — parents in one, sisters in one, brothers in another. (They would later move to a five-bedroom.) His father owned and operated a company that built and sold apartment buildings.

Fakih says the family was “very blessed,” but from his birth in 1971 to 1987, when he left home at 16 to pursue his studies, peace in Lebanon was elusive. During that time the country experienced a 15-year civil war, invasions by Syria and Israel, the instalment of UN peacekeepers, and suicide bombings.

When Fakih was a baby, his father went to the United Arab Emirates to work as violence disrupted his business. Fakih’s mother captained her little crew of children at home while maintaining her husband’s business interests. Though his father was only a three-hour plane ride away, and did fly back and forth to be with his family, he was away from them for about six years.

His parents were loving, but stern. “My dad never gave us the belt because his voice was worse for us. As soon as he walked into the house we were all quiet, we spoke differently, we walked differently.” Only during celebrations would his father kiss and hug him; Fakih says his dad wanted his sons to be “tougher.”

Fakih says his father was an ethical businessman who secured deals with a handshake. “It was always based on getting along, doing the right thing, and maintaining a good reputation,” Fakih recalls.

He smiles remembering the times he and his brother argued at home, pushing each other while Mom tried to nap in the afternoon. With her eyes closed she would take a pillow and throw it at them, always hitting the target. But he also recalls sleeping gently on her lap.

His mother did a lot of community work in Beirut, at one point suffering a leg injury from a bombing that occurred while she volunteered handing out food during civil unrest.

Fakih also remembers brief periods when Lebanon’s tensions forced his father to pack the family up to live in Cyprus or Egypt. Being on the move and having to survive made the family more open-minded to people in other countries and different ways of life, Fakih says.

Growing up, he was also exposed to different languages. Lebanon was a former French colony, so 90 per cent of his schooling was in French — Arabic was only spoken in his history class.

When he was 16 he jumped in a taxi and made the three-hour trek to Damascus, Syria, where he registered at a French school and rented an apartment with a friend. But unhappy with life there and concerned about job prospects, he headed a few months later to Italy, where an uncle lived.

In Padua, near Venice, Fakih found a college qualifying program in gemology and geology. He moved on to college and three years later got his papers to certify diamonds. At age 24 he was officially a gemologist.

But during his studies in Italy, he witnessed and was the target of racist sentiments, especially during Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Persian Gulf War.

He endured disparaging remarks about other Arabs, and his campuses were hotbeds for racism that also targeted black people and foreigners. During the Gulf conflict he feared getting kicked out of Italy amid the growing xenophobia.

Yet he couldn’t help speaking out against these views in class and at student events and complained to a college director.

Amid all of this Fakih was determined to launch his career. He apprenticed at a major jeweller and gemologist in Padua, who handled wholesale and retail.

The owner was a bigot, Fakih, says, yet would have a huge impact on his life. “He was a racist, and knew I was Muslim,” Fakih says, recalling how the owner made fun of him and often refused to open his doors to customers who were foreigners or had brown skin.

Fakih struggled in sales at first, and the owner wouldn’t let him forget it. The owner would walk around with his pant pockets sticking out, and tell Fakih “ ‘my pockets are empty because you didn’t sell anything. Now I have no money to feed my children.’

“He was so hard. I hated him. I had no answer for him,” Fakih recalls.

But Fakih used the harsh criticism to improve. “I realized something was wrong with me and I had to change my approach,” Fakih says. So Fakih worked at it, gained experience, confidence and became more persistent as a salesman.

As time went on, Fakih started making money, and grew tougher.

“I learned how not to take a beating from anyone . . . I learned the more I was stubborn, the further away I was from the solution.”

After his apprenticeship, Fakih returned to Beirut in 1997, where he partnered successfully with another man in a jewelry business.That led to a visit to Toronto to help revamp a friend’s small jewelry company, in winter 1998.

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Fakih came for a five-day visit. He hated the cold. He returned to Beirut, but found himself longing to return to Canada.

“I wanted to start fresh, somewhere where I’d have an opportunity,” he says. “In Lebanon there was war, interruptions … I wanted to do something bigger.”

He came back here on another visitor’s visa in 1999, which led to a business visa.

Fakih worked for an Eaton Centre jeweller, initially for free. From 2002 to 2004 he worked for La Swiss, a watch store. In 2003 he also worked for a watch business in Sherway Gardens shopping centre.

That’s the year he met his wife, Hanan — “I was chasing her and she wouldn’t even talk to me” — who, like him, worked at Sherway Gardens. Over time she got to know him and he won her over.

He bought some Swatch watch kiosks, and operated them in malls. But in 2006, a twist of fate landed him in the restaurant industry.

He and his wife were living in Mississauga and they were entertaining guests one day. Hanan wanted baklava and knew of a Lebanese mom-and-pop restaurant near Dixie Rd. and Eglinton Ave., so she sent her husband.

When Fakih got there he saw a poorly decorated restaurant with a broken bathroom sink.

“I thought, ‘Why am I here?’ ”

Someone who knew Fakih’s work in the jewelry businesses pointed him out to the owner, who promptly asked Fakih for a loan.

Fakih gave the owner his business card and left. The owner followed up and Fakih ended up lending the man $250,000 for his business.

“He was talking about fixing his business, making money and paying me back. He was known to be a good man,” Fakih says.

But the owner called Fakih back four or five days after receiving the loan, saying he’d used it all up and was still deep in debt. The owner offered to sell his equipment so Fakih could recover his money.

When Fakih returned to look into the equipment sale he talked to staff at the restaurant and soon decided there was something worth salvaging.

A well-run restaurant selling Middle East food but with better decor could do well, he thought. He decided to take the business over. He renovated immediately and kept the owner on the payroll until the transition was finished.

That became Paramount’s flagship location in 2007. The business grew from there.

The restaurants remain popular, while embracing a strict halal approach — no pork, no alcohol. Websites like Yelp and Trip Advisor generally give Paramount’s locations three or four stars out of five. Prices on the menu aren’t in the high-end range: for example, a chicken shawarma sandwich goes for about $7, while two skewers of seasoned lamb grilled on a charcoal barbecue, with hummus on the side, sells for about $17.

Fakih has been travelling extensively lately in a bid to widen the Paramount network, which has already opened restaurants in Lebanon and Pakistan. More are opening in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and London this year. Paramount has also signed an agreement for a location in New York.

David Soberman, professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, says Paramount’s success is likely due to the fact it’s a cut above a fast-food restaurant and offers high-quality food that is in fairly high demand in the U.S., Canada, Europe and beyond.

Soberman says a key to developing a successful chain of franchises is having a structure and well-defined set of processes that lead to standardized menus.

It’s not necessarily having the best shish kebab but ensuring it tastes the same in all outlets, Soberman says, referring to restaurants as a whole.

“People buy into the brand and their expectation is that should be delivered everywhere,” he says.

“In the case of Paramount Fine Foods, I think (Fakih) is getting to the point where his ability to do that by being at the franchises and guiding the partners he has in his organization is reaching a limit. He’s going to have to develop the structures and an education program where he doesn’t need to be involved, and can delegate,” Soberman recommends.

There was one restaurant incident in 2013 that Fakih says he had to get directly involved in.

A former employee has launched an Ontario Human Rights complaint against Paramount and Fakih, after she was sexually assaulted in a lunchroom of one Paramount restaurant. A male line cook was convicted in the incident.

According to court documents, the woman says she complained about the cook’s “lewd, sexually suggestive and inappropriate comments” before the attack, and alleges that management did nothing to address her concerns.

The Star could not reach the complainant or her lawyer, and is not naming her since she is a sexual assault victim.

Fakih denies he ignored the woman’s complaints, saying he addressed the matter as soon as he learned of it.

“She was our responsibility — we had to look after her,” he says.

He says due to the sheer volume of workers, operators of large businesses sometimes have terrible incidents occur in their workplaces.

Rosanna Skinner, Paramount’s manager of corporate services, has worked for Fakih since 2003 when he was in the watch business, and says his values are solid.

“After all these years, and all that he has achieved, he’s still humble,” she says. “I think that’s his biggest virtue — his humility and willingness to help.”

She later adds: “He deals with the head chef the same way he deals with the customer service part-time university student. He respects each one.”

William el Dbaissy, corporate executive chef for Paramount, says an incident two years ago left him stunned by Fakih’s generosity.

“One day he looked at me and said ‘Chef, is everything OK?’ My wife was pregnant. I was renewing my work permit and I had no health card and … the doctor asked for $8,000 to care for her,” el Dbaissy recalls.

“There was a lot of pressure on me.”

Fakih told him he’d cover the expenses.

In the end, the chef received a new work permit and his health card was activated, so he didn’t end up taking Fakih’s money. But el Dbaissy remembers the enormous relief he felt.

“He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’re family.’”