ST. GEORGE — While several restaurants have closed in St. George lately – from the Frostop to Twentyfive Main – Monday brought the return of a familiar name.

The Bombay Cafe, which had been the first Indian restaurant to open in the city, is back in St. George, and the restaurant’s owners hope the third time is the charm after two previous locations closed their doors. 

On Monday, the restaurant held a ribbon-cutting ceremony with the St. George Chamber of Commerce to officially open its third St. George location at 40 W. Tabernacle Street. The downtown location is one Bombay Cafe owner Shazad Sheikh said he has dreamed of having since before he opened his second restaurant in St. George.

Located across the street from Town Square Park and the Tabernacle, the cafe sits on the ground floor of a five-story building at the CityView residential complex. 

Also, the newest business in St. George is right next door to the city’s oldest business, the landmark Thomas Judd’s Store.   

“It’s a good location,” Sheikh said. “This was a location we looked at a couple of years back.”

The Bombay Cafe itself had not gone away. Its Cedar City restaurant has been going for eight years and last fall, Sheikh opened a Bombay Cafe in Mesquite, Nevada. 

But St. George was the cafe’s original home. Sheikh opened the first known Indian food eatery in St. George with Dur Indian Kabab and Curry. In 2011, the first Bombay Cafe opened at the Sunburst Shopping Center on 700 East near Tabernacle. 

However, five years later, the shopping center was sold off and demolished to make way for Dixie State’s Campus View Apartments II.

Sheikh said he initially looked to relocate to the location at CityView across from Town Square Park, but it was still in the planning stages and wouldn’t be built for some time.

Instead, the second Bombay Cafe opened in 2017 at 969 N. 3050 East in the area where Albertsons, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Costco are. This time, it wasn’t an impending demolition that closed this iteration of the cafe in 2020 but the pandemic, Sheikh said. 

Now, the new cafe is opening in still uncertain times, with a lack of available workers playing a role in causing a recent rash of local restaurant closures. 

Sheikh said he himself has struggled to get workers for his new restaurant, but said he has found the secret to keeping his restaurant running: Family.

“We’ve had a hiring sign for a month and can’t find anyone to work,” Sheikh said. “We’re a family-owned restaurant so our family is mainly how we have workers.”

Opening the new restaurant came with the typical struggles of opening a new eatery. 

“In construction, you always have some problem where everything is getting stuck, otherwise we would have opened within six months. This project took two years,” Sheikh said, though he credited leaders with the city of St. George for reducing some of the red-tape work. “They were very helpful and because of them, we’re able to open. Otherwise, it would have taken even longer.”

Bombay Cafe returns to a much different Indian food landscape than the one when the first cafe opened. For one, they’re no longer the only Indian food in town with Red Fort Cuisine of India near River Road and Turmeric Fresh Indian Grill on St. George Boulevard also serving up curries and naan. 

But Sheikh said his cafe still serves a more unique style of Indian food flavored by his Pakistani upbringing and his native Lahore, Pakistan, style of cooking that favors more ancient ways of cooking developed in the 16th century Mughal Empire.

This includes integrations of Indian dishes with Central Asian and Islamic cuisine, as well as forbidding more modern preservatives. 

“Other Indian restaurants use additives. We use everything natural,” Sheikh said. “In our country, Lahore was the center of food.”

The cafe’s menu includes chicken shawarma for lunch, curries, masalas and kormas for dinner, and appetizers of vegetable and potato mixes.

The recipes come from Sheikh and his wife Rabia, and they consider them works of art. That’s mainly because they are artists themselves. Rabia Sheikh is a women’s clothing designer, while Shazad Sheikh is known in art circles as a painter – especially of the colorful batik style that involves dyes and fabrics. Last Thursday, he was busy putting the finishing touches on a mural he painted inside the restaurant, and there are other artistic touches through the dining room from the couple.

And those artistic touches are also in the food.

“You’re dealing with colors … natural colors,” Shazad Sheikh said.

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