Ranji Smile was one of the most colourful and enigmatic figures to shape the American food scene
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, in 1901, an Indian chef opened what was almost certainly the first Indian restaurant in the US.
Ranji Smile was one of the most colourful and enigmatic figures to shape the American food scene.
In the summer of 1899, Smile sailed from London to New York. We know hardly anything about his origins and early life, not even his real name.
"Ranji" was probably a nod to the Indian cricketing sensation KS Ranjitsinhji, then a star attraction at Test matches in Britain. "Smile" could have been an anglicisation of "Ismail".
Whatever his origins, Smile possessed an uncommon knack for reinvention. Once through the portals of Ellis Island, he appended a new name to his identity, something more in keeping with America's egalitarian promise: Joe.
Joe Ranji Smile arrived in New York to work at Sherry's Restaurant, a glittering new establishment on Fifth Avenue.
In London, he had been a curry cook at the Cecil and Savoy hotels. Here, according to an 1899 profile in Harper's, he was noticed by Sherry's owner, Louis Sherry, who invited him to bring his culinary skills across the Atlantic. Late Victorian London already boasted an Indian dining scene: as early as 1810, Sake Dean Mohamed, a native of Patna, had opened his Hindostanee Coffee House near Portman Square, plying customers with both curry and hookah.
A party at New York's Sherry restaurant in 1900
Manhattanite tastebuds lacked much exposure to masala. There was, however, growing curiosity about India and its culture. Swami Vivekananda, the spellbinding orator and exponent of Hindu philosophy, enthralled audiences during his visits to the city in the 1890s. At the same time, more Indian sailors, students and professionals trickled into New York. This was probably why Louis Sherry decided to add a curry cook to his kitchen staff.
At Sherry's Restaurant, Smile joined one of the great culinary institutions of the American Gilded Age. Positioning itself as a rival to Delmonico's, New York's byword for fine dining, Sherry's catered to city plutocrats like the Astors and was famed for over-the-top dining experiences. During one such soiree, patrons marched their horses into a ballroom, saddled up and ate on horseback.
Smile, a skilled showman, thrived in this environment.
Customers soon flocked to taste his preparations of Bombay duck, a glutinous lizardfish that is a delicacy along the western Indian coast, and novel creations like "Lettuce Ceylon".
Cooking and serving became a performance. Dressed in a satin coat and blue silk turban, Smile salaamed in front of customers before enquiring, "Will you have the curry hot or mild, sahib?" Pictures of Sherry's curry chef were soon splashed across newspapers and magazines. One headline said it all: "New York women go wild over him."
As his fame grew, Smile decided in 1901 to leave Sherry's and set up his own establishment, one exclusively devoted to Indian cuisine. For financial backing, he leaned on Roland R Conklin, a prominent financier, external and the inventor of an early version of the motorhome.
A Washington Post headline on Ranji Smile in 1907
Omar Khayyam, Smile's Indian restaurant, opened in late 1901 at 325 Fifth Avenue. This was prime real estate, a block away from the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel where, 29 years later, the Empire State Building would rise. Smile adorned the restaurant with Indian draperies and hanging lanterns.
As the New York Herald reported, a fleet of Indian waiters in "voluminous turbans" staffed the premises, as did a group of Indian musicians. Now quite the embodiment of the American immigrant success story, Smile eagerly awaited his customers and fans.
Alas, they never materialised. Within a year, Omar Khayyam shuttered. The New York Sun claimed that people had "tired" of Indian fare, dismissing it as a passing fad.
Smile's stardom, which had blazed so brightly in the Big Apple, also began to dim. Unfortunately, his showmanship and flare for theatrics shaded into deceit and criminal activity.
Smile began claiming that he was, after all, not an everyday Joe but rather a prince, the son of the emir of Baluchistan, a fictional title. And, before opening Omar Khayyam, he made a quick visit to Bombay, where he pronounced himself to be a guest at the upcoming coronation of King Edward VII in London and recruited a retinue of staff: valets, a dancing girl, and "mahouts to drive his herds of elephants".
All of this was reported in New York newspapers like the Times because, as a subsequent federal case against him alleged, Smile illegally trafficked this staff into the US to work at his restaurant. Instead of becoming a pioneer outpost of Indian gastronomy, Omar Khayyam nearly got Smile deported.
Violet Ethel Rochlitz, Smile's wife, was featured in the Salt Lake City Tribune in 1913
"Prince" Joe Ranji Smile evaded deportation (many in his retinue were not as lucky) and went on evolving his invented persona, all while wooing and marrying a series of impressionable young American women. He began claiming that Indian food was a secret elixir for female beauty. "The eye will grow lustrous, the complexion will be yet so lovely," Smile promised, displaying his wives as clinching proof.
Meanwhile, he honed his performing skills at Indian cooking demonstrations across the country.
In Washington DC, Smile prepared dishes, including a dubious-sounding dessert called "bungalow", while a juggler and dancing girl entertained him. On his way to Chicago, as one newspaper in remote Idaho reported, he declared himself to be no longer the son of the emir but the brother of an even more fanciful figure, the "great Beglerberg of Baluchistan". If Smile was guilty of being a conman, then his American interlocutors were equally guilty of wide-eyed gullibility.
While Smile's theatrics and good food kept people entertained for a while, the tall tales and outright fabrications soon caught up with him.
Smile retreated from the public gaze, hurt by further brushes with the law which ranged from forcible confinement of one of his dancing girls to refusing to pay a bill at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. By the 1920s, he apparently abandoned cooking entirely, listing his occupation as a merchant.
The New Haven Union in 1912 ran a story on 'Mr and Mrs Ranji Smile'.
The final shred of evidence about Smile dates from 1937, when his fourth or fifth American wife approached the New York Supreme Court and filed for an annulment of her marriage to her now-absconded husband. Ranji Smile's last act of reinvention was to simply disappear.
Despite this inglorious end, Smile and his Indian restaurant did pave the way for the popularisation of Indian cuisine in America. Other immigrants soon tested the waters.
In 1909, Saint Nihal Singh, a peripatetic journalist from Punjab, introduced readers of the Chicago Daily Tribune to recipes for bhajias, puris, halwa, and "Fried Chicken a la Hindoo".
Aware of the unfamiliarity of many Indian ingredients amongst Chicagoans, Singh urged readers to look for them in the city's Chinese grocery stores. On another occasion, which might make contemporary chefs blush, he suggested that hamburger meat was an adequate substitute for preparing gosht pilau (a meat pilaf).
Not long after Ranji Smile was hauled to court for trafficking immigrants, a young man from Ceylon named KY Kira arrived at Ellis Island.
KY Kira opened a successful Indian restaurant in New York in 1913
Like Smile, he had a talent for reinvention. Kira joined a troupe of Sinhalese dancers which performed for American circuses like Barnum and Bailey and Ringling Brothers. In 1913, he opened an Indian restaurant in Harlem, eventually called the Ceylon India Inn. Unlike Omar Khayyam, the Ceylon India Inn was a hit.
New York now had a much larger immigrant Indian population and the restaurant attracted expatriate nationalists and revolutionaries. But it also benefited from a burgeoning American interest in Indian culture and food. By the 1920s, Kira's restaurant, now located off Times Square, catered to Broadway and Hollywood stars. The Ceylon India Inn remained in business until the late 1980s, touting itself as the first Indian restaurant in America.
That, of course, was not the case. Ranji Smile might be long forgotten, but 125 years after the brief existence of his Omar Khayyam restaurant, his legacy lives on in the thousands of Indian eateries flourishing across the US.
Dinyar Patel is associate professor of history at SPJIMR in Mumbai
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