About Ali Mahjoub

Born into a large Bedouin Muslim family of thirteen in Tunisia North Africa, chronically ill as a child, started school two years later than normal and at age seventeen in sixth grade, was dismissed from public school because of school regulation at the time.

Miraculously, with the help of his brother-in-law, after three years labor on the farm, Ali took a job as a trainee server in a government-run hotel chain; and not much later he was sent to Brussels, Belguim for a government-sponsored, management training program. After Brussels, he went to London, England and worked as maitre d’ at two prestigious hotels, the Green Park Hotel and Hyde Park Hotel.

In March 1975, Ali accepted a job in Iran as Assistant Food and Beverage Manager at the Caspian Casino Club, Old Grand Hotel in Ramsar, at which he held special functions for the Shah of Iran and the Shah’s sister, Princess Ashraf.

After the Iran revolution, in 1979, Ali went to Saudi Arabia as a restaurant manager at the Dhahran International Hotel, and while there, he heard of the siege on Mecca by an Islamic extremist militant group.

Ali had a passion for traveling and visited more than twenty countries in Europe, Middle East, and Asia, including Moscow, in the former Soviet Union. In 1981, Ali came to the United States and after a few years, studied at the Culinary Institute of America in New York. In 1991, he came to Indianapolis as the Food and Beverage Director for the Canterbury Hotel and presently manages a restaurant and hospitality advisor of a restaurant chain.