#37 Founder of SONA NYC, Maneesh Goyal
On starting SONA and serial entrepreneurship
Welcome! I’m Simi Shah, and every other week, I dive deep into the journey of a South Asian trailblazer. If you enjoy this issue, subscribe and write us a review.
Hot off the Pod 📣 Maneesh Goyal, Founder and Partner at SONA Restaurant NYC
In our latest episode, I’m joined by Maneesh Goyal, Founder & Partner of New York restaurant SONA.
Maneesh is a serial entrepreneur. In 2003, he launched his own experiential event marketing company, MKG, where he worked with Google, Target, Delta, and other high-profile clients until its acquisition in 2019. He’s since founded 3 other companies: Live in the Grey, a company culture consultancy; Pink Sparrow Scenic, a design and fabrication shop; and 214, a brand strategy and design agency.
His latest entrepreneurial endeavor is in hospitality — having successfully resurrected New York’s iconic Temple Bar and opened SONA alongside partners Priyanka Chopra and David Rabin. Initially pre-med, Maneesh attended Duke and received in his Masters in Public Health from Yale. In 2014, President Obama appointed him to the Board of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship and more recently, he joined the National Board of Planned Parenthood. A champion of the LGTBQ+ community, Maneesh is also the first out & proud individual to join us on Trailblazers. Today, he continues his professional journey as a startup investor and advisor.
Excerpts from the episode below:
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How did you get your start with events marketing, specifically your company, MKG?
I got a call a few weeks before 9/11 to help with one of Sean Combs, Puff Daddy's events for the Video Music Awards (VMAs). Somebody said, ‘Hey, we need extra hands. Can you work at this job?’ I said great. I was just trying to get into the business.
I remember taking the subway home at like three or four in the morning that night, and I felt great. I loved being in that room. I said, ‘I don't want to be who I am in that room forever because I don't want to just be the production assistant moving boxes and setting things up. But who cares? At least I'm in the right room.’
And then of course 9/11 happened. It was a very scary time, especially to be South Asian. It was an intense time. The first thing to dry up were events — nobody was going to be seen as being garish or over the top. So the industry I wanted to enter just evaporated right in front of my face. I was really grappling with what to do.
Then in November of 2001, I got a call from Sean Combs’ office. And they said, ‘We want to talk to you about doing his New Year's Eve party in Miami.’ I said , ‘Oh, no, sorry, you called the wrong guy. I was just a low man on the totem pole at that last party.’ And they were like, ‘We all saw you. We liked your drive. We liked who you were. We want to work with you. Do you want the job or not?’ And I was like, ‘Whoa.’ So I called the person who had hired me for the VMA job, and he wanted to get involved, so we did it together. And it was a full body experience.
I was completely in over my head. I was ill-equipped and I wasn't sure it would come together. But at the strike of midnight, Sean Combs looked at me and he just kind of winked —the party was a huge success. And ultimately, somebody stopped me in the airport a few days later, and said, ‘Oh my god, I saw you at Puff’s party. That was amazing. Do you have a card?’ And I said, No, but you know what, I think I'm just gonna do this on my own. And that's how I started my business. And I ended up working for Sean Combs for years. And so you know, this is like, a gay Indian guy ended up working for an impresario of hip hop — none of it makes sense. But I was willing to take some risks. I said yes, a lot more than I ever said no. And I said, I'm going to figure this out. And I'm not going to let anyone down. I'm not going to disappoint. And it ended up working. And then of course, once I started the company, I just kept growing, evolving, and scaling it.
Of course, in the last year, you turned your attention to a new entrepreneurial endeavor: the hospitality scene here in New York. You've spoken about how you wanted SONA to have an impact on Indian cuisine the way that Nobu did for Japanese food. Can you expand on that vision?
Yes. I love talking about SONA because I'm so proud of it — everyone listening and reading, when you're in New York City, please come through!
The story of SONA actually begins in 1975 in Dallas, Texas, which is where I was born, in the year in which I was born. In May 1975, my father opened the very first Indian restaurant in the entire state of Texas. He had an entrepreneurial spirit within him that he finally realized. He had a full time job at Xerox. I was the youngest of three, and my mother didn't drive at the time — they were pretty recent immigrants.
And it was amazing. I spent my boyhood in that restaurant. I didn't necessarily learn the business because he had it for a little under 10 years. Ultimately, though, I remember my playpen behind the bar and I have very visceral memories of that restaurant. It was called India House. And even at that time, I said, ‘One day, I'm going to do what my dad's doing.’
And it took me four decades. But I did it. I opened SONA. We broke ground on the space in January of 2020. So you can imagine all of 2020 was spent figuring out if we could keep this project alive. Ultimately, we were able to keep it alive, finally opening at the end of March last year.
There's this dish — our butter chicken — is inspired entirely by India House’s butter chicken. And it's obviously a fan favorite. We've got photos of me as a young boy in front of my family’s restaurant. We're paying homage to the immigrant experience. It’s this idea that stories are long, and the arc of the story can be unexpected. When my parents finally came to the restaurant, it was a very emotional experience. They said, ‘We were so young, we had no idea what we were doing when we opened this restaurant in Dallas. And to think that one of our kids, so many years later, would also now open not just any restaurant, but an Indian restaurant, to follow in our footsteps, wow.’ It was a very lovely and loving experience to have them come to the restaurant.
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