Why Hotel Mumbai Chef Hemant Oberoi Risked His Life to Save Others in Terrorist Attack
The 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai massacred at least 174 — but Chef Hemant Oberoi was not one of them.
In a PEOPLE exclusive clip, Oberoi — one of India’s foremost chefs — is a central subject in the film Hotel Mumbai, which stars Dev Patel, Armi Hammer, Jason Isaacs and Anupam Kher as Oberoi.
It tells the story of how the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in India was infiltrated by armed gunmen who killed guests and employees as part of a series of attacks that took place around Mumbai, India.
Oberoi was one of several people trapped inside the hotel, who chose to stay behind alongside several other staff members to hide the surviving guests from the terrorists inside of one of the hotel’s restaurants within the 560-room hotel.
To Oberoi, a “guest is like God,” he tells PEOPLE.
“That’s what we learned all our lives, that the guest is God and God has come to your house and the guest has come to your house,” he says of why he and other chefs under his supervision risked their lives to save hotel guests.
“It’s your duty to and responsibility to look after [them] and in such situation to protect the lives of those people and make sure they’re comfortable until the time they are with you and protect their rights and make sure they are safe,” says Oberoi.
That loyalty to guests stemmed from “the top,” as Oberoi calls it.
“We just thought it was our moral responsibility [to stay],” he says. “That’s why most of the chefs and managers never left us that night.”
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Oberoi lost seven of his chefs to the gunmen that night, in an attempt to allow the guests they were protecting to secretly and safely evacuate the hotel.
As a way of coping with the losses and the trauma of the experience, Oberoi set about restoring and opening the first of the hotel’s restaurants just three weeks after the attack.
“There was so much anger in me… how could they destroy [it all] in one moment? It was like a place of worship for us,” he says. “Every morning we went to that place. It was our home and they destroyed our home and how can they destroy our home?”
He adds, “I told the team, ‘Guys, we will get it back. We’ll get back so fast that they will wonder what [occurred].”
Oberoi no longer works at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, having left in 2016 after restoring all of its nine restaurants. Since then, he’s launched his own company and now owns three restaurants: one in Mumbai, one in New Delhi, India and one in San Diego, California.
He is set to open his fourth in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates.
Hotel Mumbai is currently in theaters.
