Two years ago, on a Singapore Airlines flight, Deepak Ohri was served Chinese food. He was not expecting the taste that met his palate. “Eating on a plane isn’t an enjoyable experience, and Chinese food, especially, loses its flavour. But this was exceptional,” says the 43-year-old CEO of lebua Hotels and Resorts, a hotel chain headquartered in Bangkok. So, before he got off the plane, the man who says he has dined at over 1,600 of the world’s top restaurants asked the airhostess to name the chef behind the meal. Sam Leong, he was told. Next thing, that culinary artist was Ohri’s consultant.
That is how Ohri operates. Having built brand lebua (Thai for “lotus”) from scratch in under 10 years — it is rated among the top 1 per cent of companies in the world in customer satisfaction and could soon be a Harvard case study — he has now entered India. Lebua’s first address is distant Dwarka in Delhi. For an ultra-luxury hotel, which plans to house the world’s most expensive restaurant — costlier than New York’s Masa where a meal costs $300-500 a head — this is an unusual choice, because Dwarka is a district of middle-class apartment blocks. Still, Ohri and his business partners plan to invest Rs 800 crore in the 400-room hotel. This excludes the building, which is already up and sharing its rear wall with a newly-built mall.
Ohri is not well known in India. Ashok Khanna, managing director of IHHR, which runs Ananda in the Himalayas and the Ista five-star hotels, has never heard of him. Others, including some who have dined at Ohri’s Bangkok restaurants, say they don’t know much about the man.
Ohri was born in Lucknow, grew up in Delhi, studied hotel management in Chennai, landed his first job at state-run ITDC in 1988, and then worked for the Leela in Mumbai, TGIF in America and the Taj Group. The turning point came on May 15, 2003 when he stepped into State Tower at Bangkok. He had moved to the country, bag and baggage, two months after his wedding because his “wife loved it”.
In Bangkok he joined a mother-daughter team of millionaires who had built a 3 million sq ft structure near the Chao Phraya River. The building had been vacant for seven years; it leaked, and rats were scurrying around. Ohri was asked to make something of it — a hotel or F&B destination. “When I was shown the place, I thought I would be a fool to say no to this project,” says Ohri. “It was an opportunity to create my name.”
He decided to develop the top of the building as a restaurant. But no interior designer, be it in New York, Singapore or Hong Kong, wanted to touch what they felt was a lost cause. Finally one man who did office interiors agreed. “The opening day was December 1, 2003, less than seven months away,” recalls Ohri. He hired two sets of contractors to work round the clock. At night the equipment would be taken up and debris brought down; in the morning construction would be in full-swing. On November 28, two days before deadline, Sirocco, the world highest al fresco restaurant and bar, on the 63rd floor, opened. “For the first three months,” says Ohri, “it had only three loyal customers: my boss, her mother and me.”
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But that soon changed. Voted among the places that offer the best view in the world, it now has a waiting list that is a week-long, or more. Several scenes in Hollywood comedy The Hangover Part II have been shot here. Other restaurants — Mezzaluna, Distil and Breeze — followed.
Thais like to be served seated at the table. Ohri introduced the Sky Bar, which expected people to stand and drink. In an industry which banks a lot of foreign tourists, many of whom would walk in wearing shorts and sandals, he introduced a dress code — smart casual, with instructions to “refrain from wearing athletic clothing, sport uniforms, or ripped clothing”. Then in 2006, he took over Meritus hotel in the same building and created lebua.
The key for a hotelier, Ohri says, lies in gauging the mood of the customer, just like a good employee in the house. “The first thing is to do away with the conventional way of approaching a customer.” He creates this experience based on hard data. So he has a team of people trained at Harvard, the IITs and Columbia University whose job is to monitor conversations in public chat rooms. “If words like luxury or lebua pop up, they transcribe the entire conversation and study it,” says he. They also study anthropology reports for psychographic analysis, passion peak, mood map analysis, and so on. Beckoning to a member of his staff, he says, “John here, who’s from Harvard, will show you the outcome of the research.” A tall man in a crisp suit turns up with a copy of the SRT Global report, which tracks customers in 5.7 million rooms worldwide.
Ohri, who is bringing Sirocco, Breeze and an Indian restaurant to his Dwarka hotel, hopes to break even in six years. The Indian restaurant is inspired by Jodhaa Akbar and a Hollywood producer will choreograph the moves of its staff. Only those who are quick learners will stay, says Ohri. To make sure, newly hired staff will get at most three minutes of training in being a perfect host. “The first session will last 60 seconds. If that’s not enough, another 60-second session will follow. If that too fails, the person is out,” says Ohri. As uncompromising is the advertisement for the Delhi lebua. It reads, “Why work more when you can work less? Why earn less when you can earn more?”
It’s aggression such as this which had his competitors in Bangkok cringing every time he would walk into their hotel. The fear was: if he likes the food, he will steal the chef.