It’s a lot to take in. And as I take my first bite, I know I need to find out everything there is to know about this dish—about its origins and how it eventually found a home in this unassuming South Bay strip mall. The answer, I discovered, is not so simple.

Steam rises from the Hawaiian crispy sizzler, which features Chinese-style noodles, onions and other assorted vegetables.s — Each sizzler has a base of pasta or noodles that gets topped with assorted grilled vegetables, shredded cabbage and, sometimes, cheese. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

A Complicated Origin Story

As it turns out, sizzlers have been a staple in Mumbai for more than 50 years. No one is quite sure how the dish was invented, but the most common origin story goes something like this:

In the 1950s, a Californian ice cream salesman named Del Johnson visited New York City and saw steak served on a sizzling hot platter, according to Forbes Collins, Sizzler’s vice president of operations and informal in-house historian. Johnson was fascinated by the dish, and in 1958 he decided to open up his own restaurant called Sizzler Family Steak House in Culver City, California, where sizzling steak platters were one of the signature items. “This is back in a very small dining room,” Collins says. “There was sawdust on the floors and everything. I mean, it was a really small business.”

In 1967, as the restaurant started to expand, Johnson sold it to a man named Jim Collins (no relation), who eventually turned Sizzler into the chain that many Americans still know and love today—a casual, family-friendly restaurant known for its inexpensive steak, shrimp and all-you-can-eat salad bar.

Collins, the Sizzler executive, believes it was around this time that the business stopped selling its steaks on a sizzling platter. But before that, in the early 1960s, Indian businessman Firoz Irani ate at a Sizzler steakhouse in California and, like Johnson, became entranced by the showiness of a sizzling hot platter sputtering and smoking up a room. As the story goes, Irani took that concept back to Mumbai and invented his own over-the-top version—one that combined cosmopolitan ingredients like pasta and Mexican cheese with Indian paneer, samosas and spices like garam masala or fenugreek. Thus was born the Indian sizzler.

That’s the timeline that most sizzler restaurants in India seem to give, anyway. On the other hand, some Indian food writers claim that Irani’s Japanese wife played a part in the sizzler’s origin story, inspiring him to model the dish after teppanyaki. It’s also true that the idea of serving steaks and other ingredients on a sizzling-hot cast iron plate has been popular at Western-style steakhouses in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia since as early as the 1960s.

Whatever his original inspiration was, what’s certain is that sometime in the ’60s, Irani opened a restaurant called The Sizzler in the fancy neighborhood of Churchgate in Mumbai, near the famous but now demolished Excelsior Theater. That restaurant is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of the sizzler.

An employee brings a samosa sizzler out to a table at Milan Sweet Center. — Sizzlers are meant to be a “show-off dish,” engaging all of the senses with their loud crackling and billowing smoke. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

The Sizzler closed after a few years, but Irani’s son Sharookh soon opened two follow-up restaurants: Touche in Mumbai in 1967 and The Place, Touche the Sizzler in Pune in 1971. Both specialized in the sizzlers his father had invented. Before long, restaurants throughout India started including sizzlers on their menus. Two of the most famous sizzler chains, Yoko Sizzlers and Kobe Sizzlers, emerged in the late 1980s. With locations across India, Dubai, Qatar and Oman, they’ve helped turn the sizzler into an international sensation.

Even as the dish became more popular, it was considered a luxury food item in its early days.

“It [was] not the kind of food you [would] have if you’re normal middle class—it [was] very upscale,” explains my husband Shaishav, who ate his first sizzler in Mumbai as a preteen in the early 2000s. “[My friend] had a birthday party and they had sectioned off part of the restaurant. His dad had this DSLR camera. So for that time, he was obviously well off.”

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The Sizzler: The California Origin Story Behind One of India’s Flashiest Dishes