![]() In New York, the trend was to move away from having too many restaurants at hotels at all. 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. 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. Eventually some hotels began to question the wisdom of this approach or, at the very least, tried to moderate it. Marco Pierre White cemented his own reputation, but the Hyde Park Hotel kept slipping further and further. In New York, Ducasse’s restaurant at the Essex House won three stars too.īut it is not clear that the hotels themselves gained very much prestige from this approach. 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. At Grosvenor House, they invited Nico Ladenis and his restaurant also won three stars. Marco Pierre White came to London’s musty old Hyde Park Hotel and opened a restaurant that won three Michelin stars. Hotels would invite successful chefs from standalone restaurants to open outposts at hotels. But because hotels had to have restaurants, to feed their own guests at the very least, a solution was found. More and more people began to find hotel restaurants boring and the food were easily outclassed by the stuff served at standalone places. Then, in the 1990s, the wheel turned full circle. And even the new generation has hotel roots: Chintan Pandya, currently the hottest Indian chef in the West, started out with the Oberoi chain.Īlso Read | The Taste With Vir: I am no John Legend fan but he really wowed the audience at his Delhi concert 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. 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. In India, hotels were the centre of everything. Even nouvelle cuisine took its inspiration from La Pyramide, a small hotel in Vienne in France owned by the chef, Fernand Point. In the East, XO Sauce, a staple of Chinese cooking now, was invented in the kitchens of Hong Kong’s Peninsula Hotel. The Delmonico’s Hotel in New York was where such dishes as the Baked Alaska and Eggs Benedict were invented. 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). There was a time when, all over the world, hotels were at the centre of the action. The Taste With Vir: Should hotels encourage great chefs to open their restaurants in hotels?(Pexels) You have just about identified one trend when suddenly it vanishes and one that you thought had died is resurrected. Say this about the global restaurant scene: It is full of surprises. ![]()
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