Suniel Shetty's Restaurant Roots: A Waiter's Son

Suniel Shetty is known first as an action star, but the record shows a second career in restaurants that started before his film one. The published accounts, from the actor's own interviews and Mumbai press coverage, describe a family business built over decades and a nightlife venture that did not last. This piece sets out what is on the record.

A father's journey

In a podcast conversation reported by The Indian Express, Shetty said his father ran away from home in Mangalore at the age of nine and found work in a South Indian restaurant in Mumbai, where his first job was cleaning tables. He rose to restaurant manager and eventually owner. Shetty said his father's employer owned three buildings and, when the boss retired, his father bought all three. "Today, I still have all three buildings," he said. The paper notes that Shetty's father died in 2017 and that Shetty worked in the catering business for several years before his acting debut in 1992.

In a 2010 interview with Mid-Day, Shetty gave a matching account of one of those premises. He said his father came to Mumbai in 1947, worked there as a cleaner and waiter when it was an Udupi restaurant, became the manager and, nearly fifty years earlier, bought the place.

From Udupi to Mischief to Little Italy

According to the same Mid-Day report, Shetty converted the Udupi restaurant into an Indian and Chinese dining bar called Mischief. In February 2010 he closed it and handed the premises to the Little Italy group to manage as a strictly vegetarian Italian restaurant, a choice he linked to the neighbourhood near the diamond market, where many Gujarati families live. He said the outside was redesigned with stone balconies while keeping in mind that it is a heritage structure, and that his father had the first meal there after it reopened.

H2O, the water-sports club

The better-known venture was H2O, a lounge bar and water-sports complex at Girgaum Chowpatty. The Hindu reports that it operated from April 2001 until it was sealed in 2004. Hindustan Times adds that the collector sealed it that year for non-payment of entertainment tax amounting to Rs 24 lakh. In 2008 the Bombay High Court issued a notice to Shetty and his partners after a public interest petition questioned a restaurant, Salt Water Grill, built in a Coastal Regulation Zone. Shetty said at the time that he expected H2O to reopen and that his legal team could handle the problems.

Mumbai Live has also described a separate Shetty venture, Thai Me Up, which closed after it opened in Mumbai Central, an area that food critic Priya Pathiyan said did not have the taste for such specialised cuisine.

Why the record is useful

A recent Hindu feature on celebrity-owned restaurants in Mumbai uses H2O and Sachin Tendulkar's Colaba restaurant as examples of star ventures that did not outlast the nightlife boom. It contrasts them with more hands-on owners. The lesson that the restaurateurs quoted draw is that a famous name brings the first crowd, and that only food and service bring the second.

Other business interests

Film-database profiles list Popcorn Entertainment as his production company, with credits that include Khel, Rakht and Bhagam Bhag. These profiles also say he owns clothing boutiques and Udupi restaurants. We treat those as a general profile and not as a verified list of current holdings.

What we could not confirm

We could not confirm which restaurants Shetty owns now, or the current ownership of the three buildings beyond his own statement. Some food web stories say H2O was relaunched as Little Italy, which conflicts with Mid-Day's account that Little Italy replaced Mischief, so we follow Mid-Day, the earlier and more detailed source. We did not find a primary record of the H2O closure other than press reports.

Sources

*Cover photo: Vaikoovery, Wikimedia Commons, *[*https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunil_Shetty.jpg*](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunil_Shetty.jpg)* (CC BY 3.0).*