Top of the pecking order

Having established Lebua as Bangkok’s and Asia’s premier luxury destination, Deepak Ohri tells Anoothi Vishal that he wants to expand into India.

You tell me how they bring your morning coffee in other hotels and I will tell you how they do it here,” says Deepak Ohri, chief executive officer of Lebua Hotels and Resorts, one of the best-known luxury hotels in the world. We are standing in the “Dome” — Lebua’s famed F&B destination — with a stunning view of the sun going down on the Bangkok skyline before us, sipping champagne rosé, and it is only apt that the conversation should turn to luxury — its business and its meaning.

“You order it and they just bring it to the room,” I splutter, wondering what the trick in the question is. Ohri flashes a brief smile and lets on: At Lebua, they ring the bell and you find your coffee sitting on a stand outside because, as he puts it, “no one wants to meet the waiter in the morning”. It is attention to such details that won Lebua Overall Best Luxury Hotel award in 2008. It was then just two years old, and was competing against 1,500 top hotels worldwide. Other awards have followed since.

The story of how an ailing Meritus hotel was rechristened, repositioned as a five-star, all-suites, luxury hotel called Lebua, could well go down in the annals of luxury entrepreneurship. (Currently, it is in the first stages of becoming a full-fledged case study at Harvard Business School.) But Ohri is now setting his sights elsewhere. India is next on his agenda, and Lebua plans to open in New Delhi, Mumbai and “one other city”. Ohri, who is spearheading the international expansion, says the plan is to limit the number of properties around the world since luxury, by his book, is about quality, not quantity. He gives the instance of Marinella, a luxury tie retailer that had only one store in the world till recently (today, there are three) but, nevertheless, had the global high and mighty queuing up. Having come all this way with Lebua, Ohri is keen “not [to] lose our way… it’s not a mass production line, after all”.

Looking to enter India by way of management contracts, Ohri is not worried about competition or the price-sensitive nature of the Indian market —at least for now. Despite the spurt in the hospitality business with Indian and foreign chains clamouring for a piece of the growing market, there are none that give guests an emotional connect rather than material “hardware” that a “Mukesh Ambani will already have” (that’s the segment he is naturally looking at) as they do at Lebua. “It could be the service staff Googling for your choice of drink and serving it to you at the entrance as you check in, or the chauffeur stopping the limo on the way from the airport and mixing it for you.”

In contrast, Ohri talks of his own experience with service in Delhi. “My wife spotted a cockroach in the room and the hotel sent in pest control, ruining the expensive lehenga she was to wear at a wedding.” Ohri will not name the hotel but says in, say, Switzerland, a comparable hotel would have first shifted the guests to another room, bag and baggage, and then commenced on operation clean-up.

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But running a hotel is merely his hobby, Ohri says. His ambition is to “be able to please my wife”, while his real work is to lecture and talk to students at prestigious management schools around the globe. It’s something he may have possibly never imagined himself doing as a middle-class boy studying in Kendriya Vidyalaya in Delhi. The Indian fixation with engineering or medicine degrees saw him attempt the IIT entrance exam along with four friends. But having sat for just one paper, he realised that there was no way he was going to crack it and so all the friends (but one) decided to bunk the following exams. Clearly, little harm was done as each of the boys followed alternate routes to success. Perhaps, film writer Jaideep Sawhnee, who was part of the group and a friend of Ohri’s, will be inspired to make a Bollywood film on the journey.

As the sun goes down on Bangkok’s River of Kings, we step out to a stupendous view of Sirocco, part of the Dome that comprises four luxury diners, 200 metres above the bustling capital and the world’s highest al fresco restaurant. A jazz band plays, as discreet diners sip on their cocktails. Mick Jagger was refused permission to sing here — because the hotel that believes in “equality for all guests” said they already had a band playing. More recently, the movie, Hangover Part II, was shot here (and in a suite recreated to look like the bar), the Warner president having decided that he would shoot in Thailand only if he was allowed inside Sirocco. It is a heady feeling. And people seem to be paying a lot of money to enjoy it (the original waiting period for the restaurant was apparently three months).

In India, however, where prices for luxury matter and even an Aman has not had a successful showing, will Ohri’s pricey F&B creations succeed? For now, the man wants us to understand the power of food. As a global commodity in short supply, food and luxury gourmet experiences are set to rock our worlds; Asia, may well be the epicenter. Already, Ohri is planning an ambitious meal this year-end: costing one million dollars, it’ll be prepared by Hollywood stars (and real chefs at the back of the kitchen) for the top pecking order of global businessmen and celebrities.

Exotic ingredients are being sourced from 15 countries for a 10-course meal and chateaux owners in France are being persuaded to part with their choicest reserves. The one-million-dollar meal will be a sequel to the 2007 dinner, billed the most expensive in the world, where 15 guests (none Indian) had coughed up $25,000 each at Mezzaluna, another Lebua F&B experience. That had been the talk of the pre-recession world of excess. We will now have to wait for another installment.