Omar Khayyam—Smile’s Indian Restaurant—opened in late 1901 at 325 Fifth Avenue, a prestigious address just one block from the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where the Empire State Building would rise 29 years later. Smile adorned the dining room with Indian draperies and hanging lanterns.
The New York Herald reported that Indian waiters in “voluminous turbans” and a company of Indian musicians staffed the establishment. Positioning himself as an immigrant success story, Smile eagerly awaited his first customers.
They never came. Within a year, Omar Khayyam had shuttered. The New York Sun claimed the public had “tired” of Indian cuisine, dismissing it as a passing fad.
Smile’s stardom in the city soon dimmed. His talent for showmanship and theatricality gradually gave way to deception and criminal activity.
He began claiming he was not an ordinary man but a prince, the son of the emir of Baluchistan—a fabricated title. Before opening Omar Khayyam, he visited Bombay, announced himself as a guest at King Edward VII’s forthcoming coronation in London, and recruited an entourage of valets, a dancing girl, and “mahouts to drive his herds of elephants.”
New York newspapers, including the Times, published these assertions. Yet a subsequent federal case alleged that Smile had illegally trafficked this staff into the United States to work at his restaurant. Instead of becoming a pioneering outpost of Indian gastronomy, Omar Khayyam nearly resulted in Smile’s deportation.
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