Mr. Sub Brand Guidelines: Yorkville’s 1968 Mr. Submarine, Part of MTY Since 2011

Two friends and a Yorkville row house.

Mr. Sub began in Toronto in 1968 as Mr. Submarine. The first shop opened at 130 Yorkville Avenue, on the ground floor of a converted Victorian row house, in a neighbourhood that was then the city’s counter-cultural and musical heart, blogTO wrote in March 2015; the company’s own history says it opened “at the height of the hippie era.” Its founders were two friends, Jack Levinson and Earl Linzon. blogTO described Levinson as a gym teacher and Linzon as an accounting clerk; English Wikipedia gives the two roles the other way round.

The menu began small. The first Mr. Submarine offered seven sandwich options, among them assorted cold cuts, Italian salami, ham and tuna, blogTO reported, and a sign in the window advertised “giant submarine sandwiches.” Workers in white shirts assembled the sandwiches in the front bay window, the article said. Linzon later recalled that the pair had only a six-month lease and at first thought the idea might be a fad, in a 1993 interview quoted by blogTO.

It grew quickly. The company says the founders opened a second Mr. Submarine five months after the first, and that it sold its first franchise in 1972. blogTO wrote that 12 more outlets followed over the next four years, including the first franchise location on Avenue Road, north of Lawrence. Through the 1980s the chain took a site at Yonge-Dundas Square and ran national television advertising, the same article said, and by 1993 it had 300 outlets across Canada.

The timing suited a home-grown franchise. blogTO described the 1960s and 1970s as a period with little competition from American fast-food brands, when chains such as Tim Hortons, Pizza Pizza and Second Cup were also founded, and noted that the area around Avenue Road and Bloor Street, a short walk from Yorkville, was where the first Harvey’s and Swiss Chalet franchise locations had opened side by side. Before Mr. Submarine, the article said, Toronto’s sub sandwiches came from a handful of independent taverns and delicatessens.

A long roll and a shorter name.

The product is the submarine sandwich: a long roll, similar to a baguette, filled with meat, cheese, sauces and vegetables, English Wikipedia says, with wraps, soups, salads, baked goods and panini alongside. The menu widened in the 1990s, when competition from US chains such as Subway and Quiznos increased; blogTO reported that the original seven variations grew to 18 and that salads and desserts were offered for the first time. The company’s website currently promotes the return of the Rib Sub, which it dates to 1986.

The name changed in 1990, when Mr. Submarine officially became MR.SUB, according to the company’s own history and English Wikipedia; the brand still sets its name in capitals with a full stop, as MR.SUB, on its website. blogTO, writing in 2015, placed the shortening after the 2011 sale, so the sources differ on timing.

The chain’s third decade brought a different market. By 2005 there were around 2,000 Canadian Subway locations and about 500 Mr. Submarines, blogTO wrote, and buyout speculation followed, with the doughnut chain Country Style among the names linked to it. Levinson, then chief executive, said at the time that the company had never been for sale and had never solicited offers, according to the same article.

Franchising shaped the chain from the start. In its early years the company offered a money-back guarantee to any franchisee who did not make money within the first year, blogTO reported, and in 1993, with Linzon as president, Mr. Submarine was preparing to expand into the United States.

Design and documentation.

Canada’s home-grown restaurant chains grew up alongside the American franchises that crossed the border, and many still introduce themselves by where they began. Harvey’s dates its first restaurant to Richmond Hill, Ontario, in 1959; Mary Brown’s traces its first to St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, in 1969. Their corporate and franchising pages tell those founding stories, name founders and owners, and describe their franchise networks in their own words.

The chains in this group cover burgers, fried and rotisserie chicken, subs, pizza, juice, salads, Thai dishes and burritos. On their own websites they present themselves through shopfronts, signage, packaging and a handful of named dishes, such as a lead burger or a chicken sandwich, repeated across their restaurants. In Quebec, names and menus appear in French, written as the companies write them.

Ownership is often grouped. Several of these brands belong to larger restaurant companies that run many chains at once: Recipe Unlimited, taken private by Fairfax Financial in October 2022, lists Harvey’s, Swiss Chalet and St-Hubert among its brands, according to the law firm Torys, and Mary Brown’s parent, MBI Brands, bought a Toronto burrito chain in 2022, The Telegram reported. Some restaurants share a building with a sibling brand, as some Harvey’s and Swiss Chalet locations do.

Some of these chains also trade abroad, at times under a shorter name, as Mary Brown’s does with MB Chicken. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and how many restaurants a dated source gives it. It marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word, and its palettes and typefaces are our own interpretation, not the brands’ official ones.

A Toronto chain in a Montreal portfolio.

The chain stayed independent until 2011. On August 18 that year The Globe and Mail reported that MTY Food Group, the Montreal franchisor founded by Stanley Ma, was taking over the privately held Mr. Sub, then a 335-outlet chain with most of its outlets in Ontario. The paper called it MTY’s biggest purchase to that point and said it gave the group its first foothold in the submarine sandwich market. MTY by then also owned Country Style, the earlier suitor, blogTO noted in 2015. The company’s own history confirms the 2011 purchase, and its website now describes MR.SUB as a division of MTY.

Inside MTY, Mr. Sub sits in a large and changing portfolio. In October 2026 The Globe and Mail reported that MTY had ended a strategic review without finding a buyer for the group, naming Mr. Sub alongside Thai Express and Manchu Wok among its chains, and said that MTY had 6,966 locations across its network. Mr. Sub itself says that as of 2017 it had more than 216 locations across Canada and internationally.

The brand’s story still begins with the Yorkville row house. Its own history page opens with the 1968 shop and the second one five months later, and the company says its first franchisee, from 1972, is still with the chain.

For a design guide, Mr. Sub shows how a name can be shortened without losing its origin: the Mr. Submarine of 1968 became the capitalised MR.SUB in 1990, and the Yorkville shop remains part of the story it tells. Compare Thai Express, another MTY chain, and Tim Hortons, which blogTO lists among the Canadian chains founded in the same period. For this guide we use a tomato red, a mustard yellow and an ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Mr. Sub’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.