34-year-old product manager opened a restaurant after being laid off—it brings in up to $140,000 a month

Zeeshan Bakhrani's life after layoffs has a lot more cooking in it.

Bakhrani, 34, worked in product management for nearly a decade while pursuing his culinary ambitions on the side. Last year, after his second layoff, he decided to go all-in on Nishaan, his restaurant in New York City's East Village that serves up Pakistani-American street food.

His menu combines "all the flavors I grew up with from both cultures," he says.

Though he's working much longer hours now — often 14 hours a day — he has more ownership and freedom than he did before. There are no more endless meetings or negotiating priorities with a boss, he says: "Here, I come up with an idea, I can knock it out in a week."

Bakhrani grew up in Devon, which he describes as a "very diverse" part of Chicago where he could "find food on every corner," from a range of cuisines, like Indian, Pakistani, Polish, Bosnian and Mexican. Bakhrani says Nishaan takes inspiration from the flavor fusions of foods he ate at home and in his neighborhood.

His mother would "up the flavors" of typical American grocery staples. She'd make sandwiches of chapli kabob, or spiced meat patties, with ketchup, mayo and sauce on white bread, for example, or she'd cook spaghetti and give store-bought sauce a boost by adding onions, hot sauce, chili powder and coriander seeds.

"There were never any rules for her" in the kitchen, he says, an experimental mindset he adopted when he started cooking around seventh grade.

Sitting in the kitchen watching Food Network, he'd think, "I want to recreate that. But I have a different spice cabinet." Spices like cumin, coriander and chili powder added "a whole different breadth of flavor" to his at-home creations. He'd try making a quesadilla using paratha or roti flatbreads instead of a tortilla, filling it with spiced ground beef and cheese. Or he'd season a burger with cumin, coriander, and chili powder, and top it with a sauce concocted from chutneys.

Today, Nishaan's menu includes dishes like Pakistani chopped cheese, Bihari barbacoa tacos and a buffalo tandoori chicken sandwich, alongside drinks like a mango fizz refresher and desserts like Dubai chocolate paratha funnel cake.

"I'm Pakistani, I'm American," he says. "I'm going to embrace parts of both." With fusion cuisine, Bakhrani's guiding question is: "How do you make these flavors work together in a way that honors both dishes?"

His hit Pakistani chopped cheese, for example, is "not just a kabob slapped into a sandwich," he says. "It's really, really re-envisioning it."

That means throwing green bell peppers and onions on the grill alongside the star of the show — a chapli kabob patty seasoned with a dozen spices — then smashing, chopping and topping the mixture with pepper jack and American cheeses and finally transferring it all onto a buttered, toasted hero slathered with mayonnaise, tamarind chutney and lime cilantro sauce.

Starting with well-known foods like a chopped cheese or tacos helps give people some idea of what to expect, he says, even if they're not familiar with Pakistani flavors.

Bakhrani says he got laid off from two product management jobs while he was building Nishaan on the side.

Several months after the first layoff, in November 2023, he says he wasn't having any luck finding work and was running out of unemployment benefits. At that point, he dipped into his savings and started doing food popups in cities like Dallas, Chicago and North Brunswick, New Jersey. He found full-time work again in July 2024. A few weeks later, he says he started selling at Smorgasburg, a New York City food market.

That helped open the door for him to participate in season 18 of Food Network's "The Great Food Truck Race." Bakhrani and his two teammates were inexperienced compared to their competitors, he says, but they managed to win. He says he took home his share of the trio's $50,000 prize, not to mention a huge confidence boost.

In the wake of that victory, he felt like "everything in the world is saying to open the restaurant," he recalls.

And he did: Bakhrani says he put $70,000 of savings towards a deposit on the location, electrical work, appliances, remodeling and other expenses to open the restaurant in August. He currently pays $6,150 a month for the restaurant's rent.

Nishaan is profitable, but Bakhrani says he hasn't taken home money yet, instead living off severance and past bonuses. He considers himself frugal, with no debt or major expenses besides rent, he adds, and his wife brings in a steady salary as a consultant.

November was a momentous month for Bakhrani. It was Nishaan's best to date; the business brought in roughly $140,000 in revenue that month, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. It was also when Bakhrani got laid off again.

He remembers thinking, "This is a sign. I'm not meant to be in the corporate world anymore."

Bakhrani sees Nishaan as a space for community. "Even though it's so tiny, you can still comfortably sit and enjoy a meal with your friends or your family," he says.

In the near future, Bakhrani wants to add offerings like a cheesesteak and chicken Caesar salad to Nishaan's menu. "People that eat halal, we don't get every option out there," he says, "so I want to expand it into something that kind of covers everybody's bases." And one day, Bakhrani says he hopes to open more locations, including another in New York and one in his hometown of Chicago.

Nishaan has seen a "huge boost" in sales from South Asian patrons supporting his business, Bakhrani says. He wants to pay it forward, hoping that patrons will be inspired to try more Pakistani food after tasting his fusion menu. When he and his peers recommend one another's businesses to their customers, "we all benefit," he says.

On social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, Bakhrani openly shares his recipes. He hopes his food, and his videos of it, "allow more people to taste it, experiment with it, have their own versions of it, sell it," he says.

He hopes "this flavor profile continues to spread across the country, and it just becomes a normal part of American cuisine."

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