Goodness gracious great balls of Rum!


I had a very nice lunch today all thanks to my friend Jatin who is a fellow entrepreneur. We met at the Bristol Hotel in Gurgaon and talked about this and that.


The Bristol is a fairly nice hotel, it used to be the only five star hotel in Gurgaon at one point, before other hotels started mushrooming all over the place. More's definitely better for me, so much more to choose from in terms of cuisine.

Have'nt seen their rooms though, but the way up from the lobby is fairly boring, nothing remarkable. I was visiting the hotel after a couple of years and noticed that the staff uniforms were different. They've probably done some minor touchups too. The Karol Bagh type renaissance paintings were still on the walls. I peeped into the Chinese or was it the Bar, must have been Chinese, because I did see a Buddha head there.  Don't know what it is about people these days, you get Buddha heads all over the place, I've seen a couple on like a stand looking like the poor guy was decapitated and the head kept as a souvenir.

We finally decided to go to the coffee shop, hope they don't take offence at the term, most hotels these days call their coffee shops the 'All day dining restaurant'. Same thing, tomato tomaahto, whatever.

(Guys, I did'nt take the photo, it's from the hotel website, just wanted to show you what the restaurant looks like.)

The staff was quite nice, not too smart on the uptake but nice. Why is it that owners will invest crores of rupees in the property and then fairly large sums on regular upkeep but neglect the training of the people who run their hotels. The restaurant was not full and there were hardly twenty guest including us for the buffet and I still had to get up and pick up cutlery from the nearest table to continue my meal.

There was a time when I used to make a fuss over stuff like that, probably my own training from Oberoi Hotels. We as restaurant managers used to take pride in our outlets, making sure that we ran a good ship. The essence used to be on friendly yet discreet, anticipatory service. Before you knew what you needed next it was there.

The food was fairly decent, I liked the bread, they had a reasonable selection, the salad bar wasn't too bad either, though some more cold cuts would have been very welcome. I hunted around for the salad dressings and finally found them hanging around the buffet, like little schoolkids bunking their class. I had the chicken soup, which was kind of bland with some very chewy bits of chicken thrown in.

I forget the name of the Chicken dish but then the taste wasn't very memorable either. For dessert, I had the cut fruit, don't know why they didn't have mango, would have liked some mango, give us Safeda if Alphonso rocks your food cost.

Most of the desserts were disappointing and even though I have a manic sweet tooth, the only dessert that looked inviting was the Rum Balls. The chocolate couverture could have been much smoother, this one had too much sugar in it. The cake bit inside was nice and gooey with raisins and stuff they could just have called the dessert 'balls' because there wasn't a hint of rum in it.  Still rum or no rum, I liked them and asked the waiter for another one.

Unfortunately didn't have time for a cup of coffee and had to run. On the way down, I could'nt help thinking, nice location, the food is OK, but the hotel lacks that intangible quality the French call 'Je ne sais quoi'.