The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (5 page)

Wednesday, 26 November 2008, 4 a.m. – the kitchens

Chef Oberoi went to bed late and the cooking began early. While wealthy guests lay between Egyptian cotton sheets, the Taj bakery fired up. In the bakery, a predominantly female corps was up to its elbows in flour, salt and yeast, filling the air with the sweet smell of fermentation. Soon, the chrome trays by the door were stacked with sticky delicacies.

By 5 a.m., the stainless steel kitchens were clattering as the executive chefs, sous-chefs,
sauciers
, commis and pot washers arrived. By 6 a.m., the
garde manger
was boisterous, with salads washed and pared while across the corridor in the main kitchen, sauces, gravies,
jus
and stocks were brought to life. In a city with the most overheated real estate market in the world, where a recent survey by Bloomberg calculated that it would take someone on Taj
wages 308 years to save for an average-sized apartment in swanky South Mumbai, the hotel put its employees up in cheap accommodation all around, including the crumbling four-storey Abbas Mansions for single men, opposite the south wing of the Palace, the women residing in nearby Rosemont Court.

From now until the early hours, Chef Oberoi would glide through the kitchens with a spoon in his breast pocket, dipping into plates as they flew out of the pass, pulling them back with a cry: ‘Not as described on the menu!’ Over two decades, the chef, who came from a Punjabi backwater that snuggled up to the border with Pakistan, had turned his childhood memories of local tastes into international favourites. The star attraction at Masala Kraft, an Indian restaurant on the ground floor marble axial passage that connected the Tower lobby to the Palace, was a modern take on his mother’s
atta
-chicken, the whole bird marinated in spices before being roasted
en-croûte
in a
tandoor.

When Oberoi, the son of a stationmaster, had started to travel, the collecting became obsessive, comforting plates from the canteen of a trundling sleeper car turning into the inspiration for bestselling restaurant dishes. The further he went, the more ambitious he became. Mumbai’s first real Japanese food was served in Wasabi, on the first floor of the Palace, in 2001, inspired by Oberoi’s meeting with the US celebrity chef Masaharu Morimoto. Oberoi also opened Souk, a Lebanese-themed restaurant on the top floor of the Tower, after a stint in the Middle East. Paul Bocuse, the French grand master of
nouvelle cuisine
, gave him the idea of opening Zodiac Grill, to reach out to Mumbai’s ‘Ultras’, the super-rich who could afford to pay Bocuse-style eye-watering prices.

Oberoi lived for cooking. Behind his office door was a set of fresh whites, in case he had to work the night through. His wife, who lived just around the corner, complained she never saw him. He inspired a devout loyalty from his 200-strong Kitchen Brigade, his star chefs immortalized in a bold group photo that hung in the chefs’ dining room, their faces grinning, their weapons of choice held aloft: a knife, a pepper grinder, a spatula and a tomato. ‘We stay because of the Tatas,’ Oberoi would observe, wryly referring to the family
that still owned the hotel. ‘We certainly don’t do it for the money.’ A Taj restaurant manager earned £300 a month, while a competitor in Mumbai might pay them twice as much.

By 6 a.m., in draughty Abbas Mansions, the noise of the day shift rising disturbed the night shift just bedding down. Amit Peshave, the 27-year-old baby-faced manager of the hotel’s twenty-four-hour coffee shop, Shamiana, pulled a thin cotton bedsheet over his head in a vain attempt to block out the din. At this time of year, the chilly mornings took some getting used to. Today he felt exhausted. The Shamiana job (which also involved managing Aquarius, the poolside café) was his first senior position, and he had only been in it for a few weeks. Located on the ground floor, on the corridor linking the Tower lobby to the pool and Palace gardens, Shamiana was where all-night drinkers and insomniacs ended up. Everyone agreed it was among the hardest jobs in the hotel.

Today Amit needed to catch up on a report he was writing about an Italian food festival he had hosted the previous weekend. He had been working on it until 2 a.m. and had still not finished. The last couple of days had been doubly gruelling, since Chef Oberoi had also asked him to look after Sabina Saikia, a notoriously picky restaurant critic who was reviewing the new ‘Chef’s Studio’. She had been rude and demanding, but he took it in his stride. ‘Only two more days,’ Amit told himself, rolling over. Friday was his long-awaited ‘off-day’, the first since taking the promotion. Maybe he would drive his motorbike to Juhu Beach, in the north, catch a game of snooker, or ogle the college girls at Pizza by the Bay, a cool, all-white restaurant on Marine Drive.

When Amit had joined the Taj seven years before as an industrial trainee, working under Faustine Martis at the Sea Lounge, the older man had got him running around balancing trays, ‘seeing how fast I could go before dropping everything’. By 2006, he was Faustine’s boss. ‘But that was just the way it is: I was a graduate and he wasn’t.’

Amit dozed off again. When he woke, he was late. He leapt up, showered and jogged around to the Time Office. Changing into his black manager’s suit, he felt for the ‘Taj Values’ crib sheet in his breast
pocket. ‘Embrace
Talent
and harness
Expertise
to leverage standards of
Excellence
in the
Art of Hospitality
.’ Every day he would gather Shamiana’s waiters and test them on it, too. It was one of the first things Faustine had drummed into him. Recite the Taj Values. Learn them by heart. Everything else will follow. The cards had changed a lot since Faustine had begun work and now also encapsulated the Tatas’ ambitious financial goals, reminding everyone how from one hotel they now controlled a global empire of 112 outlets in twelve countries, with 13,629 rooms, and a goal of turning over $2bn, or £650m, by 2016.

When he reached Shamiana, which was decked out like an Indian wedding tent, with diaphanous ceiling drapes and twinkling chandeliers, it was packed. The head waiter, Rehmatullah Shaukatali, who had been at the Taj so long some colleagues called him ‘the heirloom’, was run off his feet. Amit greeted him and his young sous-chef, Boris Rego, manning the display kitchen. Rego’s father was the most famous chef in Goa, and had trained at the Taj in the seventies, becoming friends with Oberoi. ‘The Indefatigable’, Amit called Rego Jr. The smiling chef shouted over the hubbub. ‘What d’you want for supper, Boss?’ For days, Rego had been promising to make his manager a special pizza. ‘Tandoori chicken, lot of capsicums, extra mozzarella cheese and a hell of a lot of onions, Chef,’ Amit hollered back. Rego saluted: ‘It’ll be ready by 9.30 p.m., sir.’

The Shamiana manager checked the noticeboard in the kitchen where Chef Oberoi pinned updates at dawn. Several VIPs and MPs were due. Always a nightmare, Amit thought. They drank too much, bullied the staff and tried to skip the bill. There was a big Sindhi wedding tonight, three banquets and a birthday party booked for 8 p.m. It would be hectic. He saw that the swimming pool terrace supervisor had called in sick. His assistant would have to run the poolside barbeque tonight. He called Adil Irani, one of Aquarius’s up-and-coming waiters, asking him to muck in, too.

By 7 a.m., out in the Tower lobby, Karambir Kang was on the prowl. With a walk that his friends joked looked like a shark carving up a pod of seals, the hotel’s General Manager began his first tour of the
day, appraising everything, as the rising scent of beeswax mingled with freshly cut Night Queen.

Karambir’s competitors working for other hotel chains regarded him as the Taj’s attack dog. But among his staff who flitted about buffing and polishing, brushing down the cantilevered Grand Staircase that dominated the central atrium of the Palace, the blue-eyed General Manager was seen as affable. At thirty-nine he was also a youthful ‘captain of the ship’, as he described the GM’s job, someone who led from the front, the visible face of the Taj on the hotel’s bridge, a man who inspired his team and claimed he was ‘always the last to leave’. Doing his rounds, he stopped every now and then to crack a joke, or ask about a family problem, making it his business to know guests and employees alike. Up on the mezzanine, the half-landing before the first floor, he also took a moment to make a private
namaste
to the black bust of the hotel’s founder. A Tata man through and through, Karambir admired those who had started it all.

He was as particular with his attire as he was about the hotel: a navy suit, crisp cotton shirt, matching silk tie and handkerchief, usually chosen by his wife, Neeti. Today it was orange and gold check, a bright note to lighten a hard day as the high season was upon them, with all of its associated stresses. Up on the Palace’s third floor, his deputy Food and Beverage Manager was conducting a morning stock-take in one of the hotel’s alcohol stores, hidden behind a false door, marked as room 324. On the fifth floor, in a flower-strewn room, the hotel’s ‘public areas’ florists constructed towering assemblies. Today it was roses from the north-east arranged around a base of shocking pink chrysanthemum and hibiscus flowers from Kerala.

He strode out of the Palace lobby and into the Taj’s poolside cloister, pressed with vitrine mosaics and topped by onion cupolas, giving it the appearance of a
hammam
installed in a Florentine boarding school. Architects grandly call this the Indo-Saracenic style, a cocktail of Indo-Islamic, Gothic Revival and Neo-Classical styles, in the way that India was also a blend of Islamic, Hindu, Sikh, Christian and Buddhist values. For Karambir, the Taj was part Kew Gardens and part haunted
palazzo.
Around him came the swishing of palm frond besoms
as groundsmen removed the overnight leaves. They earned 6,000 rupees a month (£70), and were gone to their
chawls
by the time the guests emerged. His circuit done, he went back to his office behind the Tower reception area to leaf through the roster of the day’s events.

He could have done this on his laptop or his BlackBerry. Everything was set up to digitally assay the days and weeks ahead. But Karambir liked to feel his way with his fingertips. The Taj deserved this kind of intimacy. For him, the hotel was a special case, so needy that he lived here too, up on the sixth floor of the Palace, in a stunning suite overlooking the Arabian Sea that he shared with Neeti and their two boys, Uday, twelve, and Samar, five. Located in the top southern corner, it was surrounded by some of the hotel’s most exclusive apartments.

The son of a Sikh major general who had fought Pakistan in 1965 and 1971, Karambir found his metier in the sales department of the Taj group soon after graduation from Fergusson College in Pune, moving into sales. When he was posted to New Delhi, he transformed the flagging brand into the city’s most popular hotel in under a year. He was sent to Lucknow to establish a new Taj out of nothing – his friends joked that the group’s owner, Ratan Tata, would tell Karambir to take a morning flight to a new city and, when he got there, advise him that he was taking over. Given how much of his life was spent in five-star hotels, it was fortunate that Karambir loved everything that went with them: good company, a glass of wine and an expensive cigar. After his mother came to terms with the fact he was never going to join the army, she joked that her son had become so hospitable he should have been a housewife.

When Karambir met Neeti Mathur, a North Indian girl with rook-black hair, at a Taj conference in 1994, he told his father she was the one. Neeti gave up her job to become a full-time mother. Uday, their elder son, was calm and stoic like his father, and Samar was peppy like his mother. Neeti got used to couriering her husband’s clothes to the next hot location and talking to him mostly on the phone. Somehow he always made it back home for parents’ evening or school plays, often slipping in late. The family was delighted when Uday won a place at Mumbai’s Cathedral School, one of India’s best.

After seventeen years in sales, in 2006 Karambir was given his first hotel to manage, the stale Taj Lands End, Bandra, a fashionable district to the north-west, loved by Bollywood stars. ‘It was putting me in the deep end,’ he recalled. His boys were delighted, hoping they would get to see more of him. And he out-performed himself, more than doubling occupancy in under a year. In November 2007, he was given the Tatas’ jewel, the Taj Palace and Tower on Apollo Bunder, becoming General Manager and Vice-President. Neeti was excited to be back in the heart of Mumbai. But the Taj proved demanding, with the family complaining that they saw less of Karambir than before, as he was always on call.

Today was no different. His planner showed that most of the hotel’s 20,000 square feet of conference, banqueting and function rooms – located on the first floor of the Palace – were booked. The indents and event sheets presented by Chef Oberoi listed the Sindhi wedding in the Crystal Room, a favourite location for society functions, which, when fully opened, stretched the length of the pool. The board of Hindustan Unilever, one of the hotel’s most powerful clients, was also expected, with thirty-five French, Dutch and Indian executives and their wives coming for a luxurious dinner in the Prince’s Room, an intimate private dining space in the southernmost corner of the hotel.

A large European Parliament party was arriving imminently, with trade commissioners and Members of the European Parliament (MEP) from Britain, France, Holland, Spain, Italy and Germany. Also checking in was a committee of Indian MPs. The Taj would soon be hosting several international cricket stars, including Shane Warne and Kevin Pietersen, who were launching the new Champions League Twenty20, and their advance team were landing in the hotel today. Sunil Kudiyadi, Karambir’s security chief, was up in his fifth-floor office, finalizing the hotel’s security plan. Over in the modern Tower, there was no let-up. A visiting Korean trade delegation of more than a hundred had booked Rendezvous, a function room on the top floor, next door to Souk.