It’s 10 am Tuesday morning. I’m sitting in the sun-basked Innis Café, preparing for a rare behind-the-scenes look at Innis College’s much-loved family-run restaurant. Following the winter storm that entangled the city Monday night, the usually bustling servery is quiet this morning, buying me time to sit down with the café’s owner and operator, Gunash Agar.

For the veteran business owner, having time to step away from her usual post behind the order counter is a rarity. Indeed, in recent months, with the café’s increasing popularity on campus, lunch lines often stretch far from the order window and into the hallway where Innis’s heritage building meets the college’s more modern façade.

What keeps Gunash cheerful during these frenzied hours of service? Her family, who she likes being close to, and who she shares most of her days with at the Innis Café.

From the start of our time together, she tells me how everyone has a role. Her husband, and former classmate from their university days in Turkey, is in charge of shopping and organizing purchases. Her son, another familiar face for frequent visitors, handles customer service, catering, and occasionally manages the grill. She herself is often at the cash, and takes care of all the accounting.

For the Agars, food service comes naturally. Before her family immigrated to Canada, Gunash actually worked in Turkey’s food control agency. When she and her husband immigrated more than 30 years ago, they bought and operated a Carrot Heads franchise at Hillcrest Mall just north of Toronto. In the early 2000s, they began their relationship with Innis College when the university went looking for healthy, reasonably-priced, and tasty food vendors to serve students — something that was hardly challenging for Gunash and her husband, both of whom hold PhDs in Food Science and Technology from a university in Turkey.

Unsurprisingly, however, producing food to meet the university’s requirements and to keep to her family’s dedication to make everything from scratch does require its fair share of hard work. Gunash tells me there is rarely a day in which her family is not baking, cooking, or preparing a catering order. Paperwork often also keeps her at work well past the café’s 5 pm close. Likewise, her kitchen staff — the few members of her eight-person team who are not related to her — regularly start their day at 6:30 am to prepare ingredients and start baking.

the reason she has chosen to stay at Innis all these years is because students have often told her that the café feels like a home throughout their sometimes lonely first years at the university

For frequent visitors of the café, it will come as no surprise that Gunash attributes her business success to the feeling of home it creates for students. She tells me that the reason she has chosen to stay at Innis all these years is because students have often told her that the café feels like a home throughout their sometimes lonely first years at the university. In fact, for some time, she also owned a second café in the Health Sciences building, but Innis students, faculty, and administrators’s outward displays of affection for the popular lunch spot in the college made choosing to stay at Innis the obvious choice when a decision between the two had to be made. The family has even received letters from alumni thanking them for their service.

Perhaps another attribute contributing to the café’s success is its menu items, of which the chicken kabob, quesadilla, and burrito are the most popular. Gunash tells me that she is constantly adopting and adjusting items to meet each customer’s needs and wants. The most recent addition to the menu, curry chicken, is the recipe of Assistant to the Principal Maitri Vosko, who brought the item to the café earlier this year.

Beyond the front-end service, the café and the Agars are kept busy fulfilling numerous catering orders across campus. The family’s personal touch and small size, as well as their assurance that every member of their team has knowledge of an order from placement to delivery makes Innis Café a popular choice for campus groups and departments. Gunash proudly tells me stories of how quickly her business can fulfill orders, including once when they were called the night before to serve hot chocolate to hundreds of movie festival goers at Town Hall, and another time when they served lasagna at a faculty picnic of 300.

Not only does the family know how to work on a tight timeline to feed the masses, but with the assistance of her PhD knowledge, no request seems too obscure for Gunash. She tells me how once she looked up dozens of recipes and went to numerous Indian markets to recreate the popular fried snack, pakora, for a customer.

What’s next for the nearly 20-year-old café? I ask Gunash if she is worried about upcoming renovations to the college, which will dramatically impact the day-to-day flows in the college’s west wing. She tells me she “loves Innis Café.” While the renovations may force her to close temporarily, it sounds like Gunash has no intentions of leaving — in fact, she hopes both to continue to experiment with new menu items, and to renew her five-year contract with the university when it comes due again in 2 years from now.

For students and faculty across campus the home made food and family-run charm of Innis Café has become a quintessential part of life at Innis College. On a campus where franchises and over-priced pizza have increasingly become the norm, the familiarity, affordability, and flavours of Innis Café make it a valuable staple in U of T’s food scene.