Omar Khayyam, Smile’s Indian restaurant, opened in late 1901 at 325 Fifth Avenue. This was prime real estate, a block away from the authentic 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 fairly the embodiment of the American immigrant success story, Smile eagerly awaited his clients and followers.
Alas, they never materialised. Within a yr, 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 started to dim. Unfortunately, his showmanship and flare for theatrics shaded into deceit and felony exercise.
Smile started claiming that he was, after all, not an on a regular basis Joe but rather a prince, the son of the emir of Baluchistan, a fictional title. And, before opening Omar Khayyam, he made a fast go to to Bombay, where he pronounced himself to be a visitor at the upcoming coronation of King Edward VII in London and recruited a retinue of employees: valets, a dancing woman, 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 employees into the US to work at his restaurant. Instead of turning into a pioneer outpost of Indian gastronomy, Omar Khayyam almost got Smile deported.
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