Diners whisk into restaurants to escape the freezing winter wind. Blaring car horns echo across the packed parking lot. Multicolor digital signs cast a lurid glow.

The Saturday dinner rush would seem typical in downtown Toronto. But it was playing out west of the city, deep in the suburbs of Mississauga, Ontario. On the edge of town where homes meet farmland, a once-quiet neighborhood has become an improbable hub for nightlife, dining and culinary tourism at a huge plaza called Ridgeway.

In the three years since it opened, Ridgeway has ballooned to include some 120 restaurants, mainly Middle Eastern and South Asian. It calls itself the largest halal food market in North America and attracts thousands of diners each week, many from beyond the city of 800,000.

Strip mall eateries serving dishes from around the world are a staple of multicultural Canada. Their social value is so big that Toronto has studied how such plazas become community hubs and invested in their growth.

But Ridgeway’s unexpected popularity has created problems for Mississauga. The vast plaza attracts crowds at all hours of the day and night, resulting in noise and littering, too much traffic and not enough parking. There have been confrontations and even physical fights; illegal fireworks; and nuisance from vehicles, including street racing.

Such quality-of-life concerns have arisen at the same time that Mississauga’s population has been growing fast with an influx of immigrants — local developments that coincide with a broader souring of public opinion in Canada toward newcomers.

Efforts by the previous prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to push rapid population growth through immigration were blamed for straining the housing supply and health care.

Days of cultural significance, like the independence days of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and National Iraqi Day, have drawn large impromptu crowds to celebrate and have “repeatedly involved conduct and outcomes that violate the city’s ability to safely maintain its roads, regulate the flow of traffic, respond to emergencies in and around Ridgeway Plaza and enforce other bylaws,” the city said in a statement last year.

“I love my culture, but then I’m also critical of some of the things that we do which annoy people and which are different, because every culture has a different nuance,” said Dr. Ilmana Fasih, a Pakistani physician and a regular Ridgeway diner, who immigrated to Canada 16 years ago. “There are problems with us, and there are problems with racism in Canada also.”

Some of the restaurant owners themselves are unhappy, worried that their popularity has drawn a backlash that could dull the allure of the plaza for visitors, who come from all over the sprawling Toronto area and even the United States.

“Our goal at the end is to get recognized as the tourist destination that we’ve inevitably become,” said Aysha Mitha, who runs a Pakistani restaurant with her parents and sits on an association representing the Ridgeway businesses. “Unfortunately the behavior of patrons over the years has led this plaza to have a certain reputation that we’re trying very hard, working with the city, to combat,” she said.

The plaza draws rowdy meet-ups by car enthusiasts, some of whom rev their engines to thunderous volumes. On rare occasions there have been assaults, road rage incidents and police chases.

“Nobody used to drive up and down here at three o’clock in the morning,” said Irene Puddicombe, a longtime resident who has agitated for changes with the municipality to address those disturbances. Lately, she is on edge. “If something untoward happens, my first thought is, does it have something to do with the plaza?” she said.

But the place has its fans and has become a destination.

Because of how it is laid out, with rows of buildings surrounding parking lots, there is almost a courtyard feel to it, said Sneha Mandhan, an assistant professor of urban planning at Toronto Metropolitan University.

“There’s something ephemeral and more organic about how it emerged,” Ms. Mandhan said. When she dines at the plaza with friends, she’s struck by how comfortable it feels for women late at night.

Tucked among the restaurants are coffee shops, jewelers, dentists, pharmacies, grocers, perfumeries and stores modeled after Middle Eastern “souks” or bazaars. In one, dozens of Turkish lamps dangled from the ceiling, lighting displays of teacups and trinkets emblazoned with images of singers like Umm Kulthum, Abdel Halim Hafez and Fayrouz, household names to many Arab families.

But the seemingly endless food available around the clock — unheard-of in the suburbs — is the star.

A barbecue joint stays open through the night, closing only between 6 and 11 a.m. A Pakistani restaurant recently extended its hours until 5:30 a.m. for the month of Ramadan, which ends on March 19, to feed the morning crowd before fast. A number of spots serve as late as 4 a.m.

The dishes run a gamut: Pakistani stew, Palestinian knaffeh, Yemeni coffee, Indian jaleibi, along with takeout classics like Mexican tacos, Chinese noodles and American burgers.

“The variety of food you get here, it’s just mind-blowing,” said Mir Ali, standing in line outside of an Iraqi grill on a recent Saturday, after driving 50 miles. “It’s a very vibrant place.”

That Saturday night, despite the cold, the plaza was overflowing with cars. Some people ate from takeout dishes in their cars under the glow of streetlamps.

In the parking lot, Nadia Khan settled on halal burgers after walking around for a bit, struggling to decide what to eat but eager to get indoors.

“The most important thing for us is that halal food is here,” said Ms. Khan, whose family is from Pakistan. But the liveliness of the plaza keeps her coming back. “It’s just the vibe,” she said.

Ridgeway happened not by design, the municipality contends, but by accident.

“A lot of people like to blame the city and say it was poor planning,” said Matt Mahoney, the deputy mayor of Mississauga whose ward includes the plaza, adding that the city cannot dictate the type of businesses that go into the plaza.

“As much as the food, it is also known as a place of chaos,” Mr. Mahoney said.

Yehudi Hendler, the property manager at Ridgeway representing the companies that own the plaza, said the landlords had invested in additional security and trash pickup at peak hours. “In some instances, the responsibility for these challenges also rests with the city,” Mr. Hendler said.

In January, City Council introduced a temporary zoning bylaw to control the plaza’s growth, restricting new businesses from operating at full capacity.

The city has also imposed steep fines on the companies that own the plaza for failing to stop gatherings with fireworks and loud music. In the summer, the city got an injunction to rein in celebrations for the national holidays of Afghanistan and Pakistan, which were expected to draw thousands of people.

One neighbor, Justyna Klos was so fed up she recently sold her home.

“You cannot even sit in your back yard,” Ms. Klos said.