I once confessed in the pages of this magazine to loving hotels. (Then they gave me more work and called it being Hotels Editor.) Anyhow, that was several years ago, and you&rsquod have thought the ardour would have cooled. Instead earlier this year, I eagerly boarded a Chennai-bound plane &mdash excited mainly because I was headed to a new hotel called Taj Mount Road.
The journey from Chennai airport through the city was a nostalgicist&rsquos dream come true. It&rsquos a dream I&rsquove had repeatedly since leaving Madras as a 12-year-old hoping that nearly three decades later, the arch conservative city of my childhood has conserved its peculiar character &mdash an ancient acidity and ugly dignity. The smell of mallipu as sharp, the political cutouts as huge, the roads as useless, Kalakshetra still a model of the high moral and aesthetic life, Ponnusamy&rsquos still a simple temple to food, and VTI frozen beyond time.
Of course, things like hotel names aren&rsquot mere accidents when the properties in question belong to corporate houses likeTaj Hotels. But this is a felicitous christening a name designed to appeal to Madras sentimentalists like me, for whom &lsquoMount Road&rsquo is a warm invitation to visit in the way that &lsquoAnna Salai&rsquo is unlikely to be to the tourist hoping to find traces of the city&rsquos considerable colonial past amid its robustly Dravidian present and &mdash most important in terms of &lsquopositioning&rsquo &mdash to the business traveller looking for a smart, and smart-sounding, hotel that combines the advantages of location, pricing and Taj service (when it&rsquos good, it&rsquos very very good).
For this is what the Taj Mount Road aims to be and, from what I could tell, was competently on the way to becoming a first-class business hotel. Its location is superb, just off Mount Road/Anna Salai, on the quiet Club House Road &mdash sister property Taj Connemara is across the road, next to the Spencer&rsquos mall it&rsquos a minute away from the India Tourist Office, a few minutes from the prehistoric Victoria Technical Institute.
It doesn&rsquot take much to be slapped awake from nostalgic ramblings &mdash just a tall blue glass façade or two when you&rsquore expecting a whitewashed bungalow, some glacial contemporary décor when you&rsquore picturing riotous Tamilian colour, restaurants that wouldn&rsquot be out of place in New York, staffed by smart young men and women who could be from anywhere in the country.
All this was, of course, demonstrating a crucial aspect of successful business-hotelness &mdash where rushed guests from anywhere in the world can hope to feel comfortable in cosmopolitan surroundings rather than jarred by excessive local feeling. My inability to recall the exact shade of room furnishings is less an indication of an unobservant eye than a tribute to the undemanding ambience. For how many guests really care It&rsquos the other stuff that&rsquos important, and Taj gets them right beds with good, not-too-soft mattresses, ample seating, bathrooms with admirable showers and top-of-the-line toiletries, room service that brings you excellent food quickly.
It&rsquos in the F&B department that the Taj Mount Road really sparkles. Again divining that interesting food options are among the few exciting leisure activities that the business guest can spare time for, the hotel&rsquos three restaurants are all well-serviced venues that offer inventive food. The Club House takes the tired multi-cuisine menu of coffee shops around the world, slaps it around a bit and presents an energetic choice &mdash there&rsquos a pasta counter, a &lsquowokery&rsquo and a dessert display. The attractive rooftop Mediterranean restaurant, Kefi, serves standards from Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Greece and Spain &mdash mezze, moussaka, tagines, paella, shawarma, etc.
For me, the star of the show is Beyond Indus, a genuine fine-dining venue. With a menu developed from dishes of Punjabi-Sindhi origin, the restaurant hits a balance of comfort food (kababs, dal), traditional classics (taar qorma, kacche gosht ki biryani) and some disconcerting but pleasing innovations (a bellpepper-and-pineapple shorba). Adventurous guests can try the &lsquoIndiyaki&rsquo &mdash teppanyaki gone Indian. So, you begin by choosing between veg (banana flower, tofu and broccoli, etc.) and non-veg (chicken, prawn, squid, etc.) a gravy (tomato-onion, pepper, etc.) a flavouring (roast garlic, pickling spices, etc.) and a topping. Then the chefs somehow make it all come together in a main dish served with kaali dal and naan. Does it work I ask F&B manager Natasha Verma. Always, she claims, every option works with every other. Obviously I didn&rsquot hang around long enough to test the claim, but I did try the single malt pairing. And, well, that works too.
But there&rsquos a limit to how much cleverness a person can digest. The last morning, as I surveyed my idli-dosa-sambar-chutney-filter coffee breakfast with relief and delight (all as good as the strictest mami&rsquos), I uttered unheard words of thanks. The woolly-headed Madras lover departed a trendy Chennai hotel with nostalgia intact.
The information
Where 2 Club House Road, Chennai-2
Accommodation Superior, Deluxe and Premium rooms Executive, Deluxe and Presidential Suites
Tariff Rs 13,000 (Superior room) Rs 15,000 (Deluxe room) Rs 17,000 (Premium room) Rs 18,000 (Executive suite) Rs 22,000 (Deluxe suite). Internet rates from Rs 6,500 for Superior room
Contact 044-66313131, www.tajhotels.co
