The Taste With Vir: Is hotel dining making a comeback all over the world?

In India, hotels were the centre of everything. If you wanted to celebrate or go out for a great meal, it was nearly always a hotel. Then, in the 1990s, the wheel turned full circle. More and more people began to find hotel restaurants boring

Say this about the global restaurant scene: It is full of surprises. You have just about identified one trend when suddenly it vanishes and one that you thought had died is resurrected.

The Taste With Vir: Should hotels encourage great chefs to open their restaurants in hotels? (Pexels)

Let’s take hotel dining. There was a time when, all over the world, hotels were at the centre of the action. The great Auguste Escoffier who more or less re-invented French cuisine was a hotel chef (including a famous stint at the Savoy in London). The Delmonico’s Hotel in New York was where such dishes as the Baked Alaska and Eggs Benedict were invented. In the East, XO Sauce, a staple of Chinese cooking now, was invented in the kitchens of Hong Kong’s Peninsula Hotel. Even nouvelle cuisine took its inspiration from La Pyramide, a small hotel in Vienne in France owned by the chef, Fernand Point.

In India, hotels were the centre of everything. If you wanted to celebrate or go out for a great meal, it was nearly always a hotel unless you were prepared to slum it. A whole generation of great Indian chefs who made their names abroad came from India hotel kitchens: Cyrus Todiwala and Gaggan Anand from the Taj, Atul Kochhar and Vineet Bhatia from the Oberoi group, Vikas Khanna from the Leela. And even the new generation has hotel roots: Chintan Pandya, currently the hottest Indian chef in the West, started out with the Oberoi chain.

Then, in the 1990s, the wheel turned full circle. More and more people began to find hotel restaurants boring and the food were easily outclassed by the stuff served at standalone places. But because hotels had to have restaurants, to feed their own guests at the very least, a solution was found. Hotels would invite successful chefs from standalone restaurants to open outposts at hotels. Marco Pierre White came to London’s musty old Hyde Park Hotel and opened a restaurant that won three Michelin stars. At Grosvenor House, they invited Nico Ladenis and his restaurant also won three stars. In Paris, such hotels as the Plaza Athenee (and later, the Meurice) handed over their restaurants to Alain Ducasse who earned three Michelin stars for them. In New York, Ducasse’s restaurant at the Essex House won three stars too.

But it is not clear that the hotels themselves gained very much prestige from this approach. Marco Pierre White cemented his own reputation, but the Hyde Park Hotel kept slipping further and further. Eventually some hotels began to question the wisdom of this approach or, at the very least, tried to moderate it. The ubiquitous Alain Ducasse has a restaurant at London’s The Dorchester (three stars again) but the hotel also has its own restaurant, run by its own chefs which it also promotes. This is a far cry from the 1980s, when the food at The Dorchester was justly famous and its own chef Anton Mossiman was a star in his own right — but at least it reduces the hotel’s dependence on chefs from outside.

In New York, the trend was to move away from having too many restaurants at hotels at all. The last grand hotel to open in Manhattan, the Grand Hyatt, opened without much in the way of dining options. At the St. Regis (the original, though Starwood went on to build a chain appropriating the name) in New York, they decided not to get another famous chef when Alain Ducasse’s restaurant closed. As one of the top managers at that hotel told me at the time: “New York is a city full of restaurants. Our guests don’t want to eat in their own hotel”.

Something similar seems to have happened to Indian hotels. They were once at the forefront of gastronomic evolution. There would be no Sichuan food without the Golden Dragon at the Taj; no sushi boom without 360 at the Delhi Oberoi; no high-quality Awadhi food at upscale restaurants without ITC ‘s Dum Pukht; and so on. All of these places created trends that were widely copied.

It is a long time since any hotel restaurant set off a trend and nearly all the chefs one hears about these days cook at standalones. Some chains have recognised the need to get help from outside or from their alumni. The Oberoi group has relied on Vineet Bhatia. The Taj reached out to Rajesh Bharadwaj the owner of New York’s Junoon (formerly of the Delhi Taj) to open its successful Loya concept.

I am beginning to wonder if hotel dining is making a comeback all over the world. The obvious example is Dubai’s Atlantis. When it opened, 15 years ago, boasting of restaurants by top chefs Santi Santamaria (three stars in Spain) Michel Rolland (two stars in Paris) Giorgio Locatelli (one star in London) and Nobu (stars in many cities but somehow, he is much more than the sum of his stars) it introduced a new level of fine dining to Dubai.

Then, as Dubai grew more prosperous, many of the world’s top chefs opened restaurants at other hotels and Atlantis seemed less distinctive. But no matter. It has brought new chefs (such as Gordon Ramsay), created its own superstar in Gregoire Berger, and has opened an even more glamorous sister property called Atlantis, the Royal, with more restaurants, more chefs (including Heston Blumenthal) and new concepts. The old Nobu becomes a new restaurant for Bjorn Frantzen (who already has two restaurants in two continents with three stars) and two new Nobus have opened: one a beach club and the other, high up in the hotel, is the largest Nobu in the world.

The interesting thing about Atlantis’s success is that the chefs are not allowed to outshine the main brand as happens so often with restaurants run by famous chefs at hotels. It is Atlantis that remains the destination. (So does the new Royal Atlantis.)

This seems novel and original to us, but the idea (like much of Atlantis’ management) comes from Las Vegas which has transformed itself from the sin-and-gambling destination celebrated in such films as Casino into one of the world’s great gourmet locations, encouraging great chefs to open their own restaurants at hotels.

The Vegas-Atlantis model is an expensive operation to pull off but if hotels can do it, then they enter a different league. Suppose a new hotel opened in Mumbai and boasted of outlets run by Hussain Shahzad, Vikramjeet Roy, Prateek Sadhu, Saurabh Udinia and such global brands as Revolver, Tresind and Amaya along with top international restaurants. Wouldn’t you want to go? Wouldn’t the food be a factor in making you want to stay there?

I reckon it would. But restaurant trends change so often that Indian hotels are understandably nervous about taking the risk.

But I think the risk is worth it!