Ranji Smile’s brief New York triumph began the American life of Indian curry
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, an Indian chef opened what was almost certainly the first Indian restaurant in the United States. The name behind that experiment was Ranji Smile, a figure who arrived in New York in 1899 and almost immediately began remaking himself for American eyes.
Very little survives about his early life. Even his original name is uncertain. “Ranji” may have been borrowed from KS Ranjitsinhji, the Indian cricket star who had become a sensation in Britain, while “Smile” may have been a reshaped version of Ismail. In New York, he added yet another identity, calling himself Joe. Reinvention was not a side note in his story; it was the engine that carried him from London kitchens to Fifth Avenue dining rooms.
Sherry’s gave curry a stage, and Smile knew how to use it
Smile arrived in New York to work at Sherry’s Restaurant, one of the great culinary institutions of the Gilded Age. In London, he had already worked as a curry cook at the Cecil and Savoy hotels, so he brought with him a specialist skill that Manhattan diners rarely encountered. Sherry’s owner, Louis Sherry, appears to have recognized that novelty had commercial value. New York’s wealthy diners were already primed for spectacle, and Smile fit neatly into that world.
At Sherry’s, he served a city elite that included the Astors and other plutocrats accustomed to theatrical luxury. The restaurant was famous for extravagant entertainments, including one famously surreal occasion in which patrons marched their horses into a ballroom, saddled up, and ate on horseback. Against that backdrop, Smile did more than cook. He performed. Dressed in a satin coat and blue silk turban, he salaamed before customers and asked whether they wanted the curry hot or mild, sahib. Newspapers and magazines noticed immediately. One headline captured the reaction with blunt enthusiasm: New York women go wild over him.
His dishes carried the same novelty charge. Customers came for Bombay duck, a glutinous lizardfish from the western Indian coast, and for creations with names designed to intrigue rather than reassure, such as “Lettuce Ceylon.” Curry, in this setting, was not merely food. It was an imported experience, wrapped in costume, mannerism, and social performance.
Omar Khayyam tried to turn curiosity into a permanent market
By 1901, Smile decided to leave Sherry’s and open his own restaurant devoted entirely to Indian cuisine. He secured backing from Roland R Conklin, a prominent financier with his own flair for invention. The new restaurant, Omar Khayyam, opened at 325 Fifth Avenue in late 1901, in one of the most prized parts of Manhattan. Smile decorated the space with Indian draperies and hanging lanterns. The New York Herald described a staff of Indian waiters in voluminous turbans and a group of Indian musicians, turning the room into a deliberate act of immersion.
The gamble failed quickly. Within a year, Omar Khayyam had closed its doors. The New York Sun dismissed Indian food as a passing fad, claiming that diners had tired of it. The collapse was abrupt, and it exposed a hard commercial truth: spectacle could attract attention, but it could not always sustain demand.
One sentence captures the collapse without ambiguity. Omar Khayyam did not become the launchpad for an enduring Indian dining boom in New York; it vanished before the market could be tested properly.
Fraud, immigration trouble, and a persona that outran the kitchen
Smile’s public image grew more unstable as his fame spread. His flair for theatre increasingly blended with deception and criminal conduct. He began presenting himself not as an ordinary immigrant but as a prince, the son of the emir of Baluchistan, a title with no basis in reality. Before opening Omar Khayyam, he also traveled to Bombay, where he claimed to be a guest at the coronation of King Edward VII and assembled a staff that included valets, a dancing girl, and mahouts to drive his herds of elephants.
Those claims mattered because they intersected with immigration law. Federal authorities later alleged that he had illegally trafficked this staff into the United States to work at his restaurant. Instead of becoming a model immigrant restaurateur, he nearly triggered deportation proceedings. Some members of his retinue were not as fortunate and apparently faced removal, while Smile managed to evade that fate.
The combination of charisma and fabrication became his defining pattern. He also married a series of young American women and promoted the idea that Indian food had beauty-enhancing powers. “The eye will grow lustrous, the complexion will be yet so lovely,” he promised, presenting his wives as proof. Those claims turned cuisine into quasi-medicine, recasting curry as a route to personal transformation rather than simply a meal.
A broader American appetite emerged after Smile stepped aside
Smile did not remain the only Indian culinary entrepreneur testing American tastes. Even after his legal troubles, other immigrants continued to probe the market. In 1909, Saint Nihal Singh, a journalist from Punjab, introduced Chicago readers to bhajias, puris, halwa, and “Fried Chicken a la Hindoo.” He clearly understood the barriers facing unfamiliar ingredients in Midwestern kitchens, advising readers to search for Indian staples in Chinese grocery stores. On another occasion, he offered hamburger meat as a substitute for gosht pilau, a pragmatic concession that made Indian cooking seem less remote and more adaptable.
A few years later, KY Kira arrived from Ceylon and opened an Indian restaurant in Harlem in 1913. Like Smile, he had worked in performance, touring with Sinhalese dancers who appeared with American circuses. Unlike Smile, he found a durable formula. His restaurant, eventually known as the Ceylon India Inn, succeeded in a city that now had a larger Indian immigrant population and a growing appetite for Indian culture. By the 1920s, once it had moved off Times Square, it catered to Broadway and Hollywood figures and remained in business until the late 1980s.
Smile disappeared, but the market he helped create endured
Smile’s final years are mostly blank. By the 1920s, he had apparently left cooking behind and listed himself as a merchant. In 1937, the last clear trace surfaced when one of his American wives sought an annulment from a husband who had vanished. His last act of reinvention was disappearance.
His restaurant was short-lived, and his personal life was chaotic. Even so, his place in American food history is difficult to ignore. He brought Indian cooking onto a prominent Manhattan stage before the country had much vocabulary for it. The public response was uneven, sometimes fascinated and sometimes dismissive, but the experiment established a precedent. Long after Omar Khayyam closed, thousands of Indian eateries would flourish across the United States, building a market that Smile could glimpse only briefly and could never fully control.