Cigar Houses
Rocky Patel: The Hollywood Lawyer Who Became a Cigar Maker
A Los Angeles lawyer discovered cigars in Beverly Hills, bet on a small brand, and ended up building one of the biggest houses in Nicaragua and Honduras.
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Few modern cigar stories start as far from the field as Rocky Patel’s. Its founder did not come from a tobacco family. He came from a law office.
From the courtroom to the humidor
In the early 1990s, Rakesh “Rocky” Patel was a lawyer in Los Angeles, working on entertainment and product liability cases. As his company tells it, a girlfriend who smoked cigars took him to the Grand Havana Room in Beverly Hills, and that is where he discovered the premium cigar.
In the mid-1990s he helped finance a new brand, Indian Tabac, whose name nodded to Indian motorcycles. Sources give 1995 or 1996 as the start. What began as an investment became his trade: Patel went from quiet partner to running the company, and set out to control the whole process, from growing the tobacco to rolling it.
The Vintage series
The breakthrough came in the early 2000s, when the company became Rocky Patel Premium Cigars and launched the Vintage 1990 and Vintage 1992. The numbers are not release dates but the harvest year of the aged wrapper they used. The reviews were excellent, and the Vintage series became the foundation of the brand.
Those first Vintages were made in Honduras. The first one made in Nicaragua was the Vintage 2006 San Andrés.
Estelí, Honduras and Naples
Today the company is based in Naples, Florida, and produces in Nicaragua and Honduras. In Estelí it opened its Tavicusa factory, in 2008 according to the brand’s own announcement. The Indian Tabac brand was retired in 2014.
Rocky is still the face of the company, and since 2013 he has run it together with Nish Patel. The catalog is huge, with lines like Decade, The Edge, Special Reserve and many more, and few shops in the world don’t have a Rocky Patel in the humidor.
Why it matters
Rocky Patel shows that you can come into cigars from the outside. With no tobacco heritage, he built one of the most recognizable brands in the world by learning the craft and betting on aged tobacco. His story is also that of a whole generation that discovered the cigar in the boom of the 1990s.
Several dates from the early years change depending on the source. We say so where they disagree.