It wasn’t his birthday yesterday nor that of his wife or three children, but Sushil Malhotra celebrated anyway.

It was 40 years ago that he came to America from India as a 17-year-old to study engineering at City College. He stayed on to obtain an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business. Today, he’s seen by some as the “father” of Indian cuisine in America.

Mr. Malhotra ratcheted up ethnic dining from the curry-in-a-hurry variety. He instead produced what’s-the-hurry? fare offered in establishments where it often seems that visas, not merely connections, are needed for entry.

“I saw a niche for upscale dining,” the president and co-founder of the Cafe Spice group, said.

But wasn’t it a major leap from the world of engineering to that of haute cuisine? “Ah,” Mr. Malhotra said, “so it would seem. But I applied the organizational skills I learned as an engineer, and then at business school, to the restaurant business.”

Actually, he learned both sets of skills even earlier. His parents, Mulk Raj and Krishna Malhotra, arrived in Bombay from their native Karachi when India was carved up by the British into secular India and Islamic Pakistan in 1947. Hundreds of thousands of refugees like the Malhotras were forced to start over.

The older Mr. Malhotra did well as an electrical entrepreneur. He encouraged the young Sushil to join him at the family factory after school.

“I must have been 14 when I started working with my father,” Mr. Malhotra said. “He taught me two things that are even more useful now: dealing with people and dealing with day-to-day problems. I learned how to manage a business, how to be diplomatic, how to balance the books.”

Although he’d been in the engineering field, Mr. Malhotra began to sense that curry was in the air. More and more Indian students were coming to America for higher education, changing the tradition of going to Britain. When Mr. Malhotra arrived in 1966, there were just a few hundred Indians at American educational institutions; now there are some 100,000, or almost 20% of all foreign students in this country.

These students yearned for their native cuisine. So did the Indian physicians and the professionals coming here to work on Wall Street. Mr. Malhotra began selling spices and condiments at a shop on Lexington Avenue. It was only a matter of time before he opened his restaurants.

One of those restaurants, Dawat, became an instant hit – not only on account of good reviews, but also its proximity to Bloomingdale’s.

“In real estate they say, ‘Location, location, location,'” Mr. Malhotra said. “Well, you can say the same thing in the restaurant business.”

With his curried success under the belt, so to speak, Mr. Malhotra decided to tone up the quality of fast food offered to New Yorkers. He launched the Cafe Spice series of eateries in the city and expanded it to Philadelphia; the restaurants now bring in revenue of more than $5 million annually.

And now he’s taking on the British – by manufacturing condiments and savories British merchants exported to America at a commissary in Long Island City. It does catering as well.

“If you want really good Indian food, you can now get it here in America,” he said. “You will never have to go home again.”