Suraj Bajaj, a physician in New Delhi, wanted the best for his daughter Sneh, 22, with whom he had always been close. So in 1972 he found her a husband, an Indian college professor who lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Sneh—who had earned a college degree in economics in New Delhi—lived in the burgeoning Indian community of Queens, New York. After meeting with the prospective groom in New Delhi, Suraj summoned Sneh home. A good daughter, she came at once, but was aghast when she learned the purpose of her visit. Nonetheless, in a matter of days the wedding was held.
Months later, the marriage already fizzled, Sneh’s father died at 55 from surgical complications following a motor scooter accident. Overcoming despair, Sneh took it upon herself to support her widowed mother, her three younger brothers and her older sister, who was widowed herself and had two young children. To learn English, she took a job serving shots and beers at a bar outside Fort Bragg. She took the Christian Valmy cosmetics course and became a beautician. But as an Indian woman in the South in the mid-’70s, the only job she could get was at a funeral home, applying makeup to corpses.
Moving back to New York, Sneh (rhymes with day) landed a prestige job as an Air India ticket agent at the airline’s Fifth Avenue office. But she continued to squirrel away extra money for her family by addressing envelopes for 10 cents each and buying cosmetics in bulk at outlet stores and selling them on trips home to India.
Flash forward: Sneh turned 65 this year. On December 2, at Mayfair Farms in West Orange, the New Jersey Restaurant Association will honor her as its 2013 Restaurateur of the Year. She is the first Indian or Asian and only the second woman to win the award in its 34-year history.
How did this come about?
In 1978, an enterprising Indian emigre named Satish Mehtani wanted help getting last-minute airplane tickets to and from India for his life-insurance clients. A mutual friend introduced him to Sneh, who was 14 years his junior. He was immediately smitten with her beauty, intelligence and poise. She had her sights set on career rather than romance. But slowly he won her over, and in 1982 they wed—the second marriage for each.
Growing up in New Delhi, Sneh had been considered a tomboy, famous for prying open pay phones to root out coins. She played with her three younger brothers more than with her sister, who was eight years older. She helped her father in his clinic, fetching instruments and counting out pills for his patients and folding them into stiff paper packets. “I can still do it today,” she says, miming the motions with her fingers.
With a prosperous Indian community developing in New York, the Mehtanis recognized the need for an upscale alternative to the dreary steam-table joints of the day. In 1983 they opened their first restaurant, the Moghul Room in the Pennsylvania Hotel, across Seventh Avenue from Madison Square Garden. As Punjabis, from northern India, the Mehtanis made a point of serving authentic North Indian cuisine, including dishes baked in then-novel clay tandoori ovens. The Moghul Room became a magnet for the Bollywood stars who performed at the Garden and stayed at the hotel.
Never a cook, Sneh made her mark as an eagle-eyed administrator and shrewd judge of talent. Before she and Satish opened the Moghul Room, she traveled to India, dining in the best restaurants and interviewing chefs. The one she hired, Sundar Kumar, stayed with the family for 29 years, becoming a minority owner and executive chef overseeing all their restaurants.
“Not only hard work,” she says. “It has to be smart work.”
Three months after they opened the Moghul Room, the Mehtanis’ son Shaun was born. In 1991, recognizing a fine dining opportunity in the growing Indian community of Edison, they opened Moghul. The location, concealed from the street in a strip mall behind a supermarket, seemed unpromising.
“If the food and service are excellent,” Satish declared, “people will find it.” Twenty two years later, Moghul is still going strong in that same spot.
Other restaurants followed, including the Indo-Chinese Ming in Edison in 2001 and the shared-entrance trio of Mehndi, Ming II and SM23 in Morristown in 2007. For many years, Sneh was known as the “Tigress” of off-site catering, pulling off as many as 20 weddings in a weekend, some with as many as 600 guests.
Next year, Dartmouth MBA Shaun turns 30, gets married and ascends to the leadership of the company after a two-year transition. “I pass on a good baton,” says Sneh, with a smile.
Shaun laughs. “My mother is already quote-unquote retired,” he says. “She still calls me every day with questions and ideas. And God forbid I don’t pick up.”