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“Dinesh, yaar, we can’t get a good north Indian meal in Bangalore... even the dal here is made the south Indian way.” It was in response to this lament of a North Indian garment exporter friend in the late 1990s, recalls Dinesh Nair, co-chairman and managing director of Hotel Leela Venture, that he conceived and launched Jamavar in 2001 at the Leela Palace Bangalore. This luxury restaurant serves both north Indian and south Indian cuisines. To ensure his friends got the real deal, Nair brought a corporate chef from Delhi to oversee the north Indian cuisine and had another from Chennai looking after the south Indian menu, which includes lobster neerulli, a recipe of his mother, Leela, after whom the hotel chain is named.
The Bangalore property marked Nair’s first attempts at, in his words, “dabbling” in the family’s hotels — till then, he had been involved with running Leela Lace, the Nairs’ garment export company with 16 factories and over 16,000 employees, while the hotels were being steered by Dinesh’s father and founder of both businesses, the redoubtable Captain CP Krishnan Nair.
Dinesh and his wife, Madhu, have been looking after the operations of the Leela group for years, but the conversation we are having is the 58-year-old’s first extended interview to the press. Interactions with the media have till now been mostly the prerogative of his father, who kept a tight grip on the the hotel chain he founded till February last year. Still, the son appears at ease, and has dressed for the meeting in what he mentions is semi-casual attire that befits a Saturday afternoon — a powder blue, full-sleeve shirt and dark trousers, with his belt at the rather high level favoured by Infosys chairman Narayana Murthy.
Though his hotels are equated with unabashed opulence, Dinesh himself is not overly conscious of brands when it comes to personal choices. He was content to wear the Armani watches that he would pick up at department stores abroad for a few hundred dollars till his daughter forced him to wear a Panerai that she gifted. The story of his shoes is even more revealing. He is wearing half-black, half-tan shoes by Cole Haan, an American brand. These are shoes he has been wearing for a couple of decades. When the company stopped manufacturing his favourite pair, he kept visiting the store till an employee sympathetically told him the company could refurbish his old pairs, if he had any. On his next trip, he took 12 pairs! “I got them back, and hope that as long as I wear shoes, I’ll have them,” he says.
When his father stepped down and became chairman emeritus, the day-to-day operations passed on to elder son Vivek, who looks after finance and marketing, and Dinesh, who heads operations. But much had changed since a 65-year-old Captain Nair threw conventional wisdom to the winds and opened his first five-star hotel near the airport in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1986 while the competition was concentrated in tony South Mumbai. There is no better testament to the success of that gamble than the number of luxury hotels that now surround the Leela, Mumbai. But the hotel chain with eight luxury properties across the country has also been weighed down by a debt of Rs 4,500-crore. The company has since embarked on a course correction, and is now pursuing an asset-light strategy through divestment of stakes in properties and sale of some of its land parcels. “I would be lying if I said the debt overhang is not a matter of concern,” says Nair. Four luxury hotels are currently under development as well as two branded residence projects, though hotels in Pune and Hyderabad have been scrapped.
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Putting the company’s finances back in order, though, is mostly brother Vivek’s domain. Dinesh drives the hotels’ food and beverage operations though he adds that the ‘B’ in F&B, is looked after by niece Aishwarya, because he is mostly a teetotaller. Food, though, is right up his alley. “It is something I enjoy because I’m a bit of a foodie myself ,” says Nair. “It’s evident from my size.”
Our conversation takes place in Le Cirque Signature at The Leela Mumbai, the branch of the legendary New York restaurant that has just opened, and the second in India. The first is in the Rs 1,700-crore Leela Palace New Delhi, both the jewel and thorn in the group’s crown (At Rs 6 crore a room, it is the most expensive hotel constructed in the country and considered to be a major contributor to the enormous debt.) “When we were planning the hotel, the direction came from my father that we would have to offer something truly special. The guests coming to the hotel would be very well-travelled,” says Nair, who is responsible for the international restaurant tie-ups the group has forged. Also, most youngsters of today who study in the US and UK are used to eating at the best restaurants there since they are PhDs, he grins. PhDs? “Papa has dough,” he expands.
The first choice for a restaurant was the uber posh Italian restaurant Nello’s on Madison Avenue. But with the owners reluctant to expand, Le Cirque was the obvious choice. “It is an iconic name and was also a popular haunt of dad’s and mine,” says Dinesh. The restaurant has been doing extremely well since it opened in Delhi, he says, and the group now plans to take it to its hotel in Bangalore next month and Chennai later in the year. While the average ticket spend in Delhi is around Rs 6,500, with heads of state and ambassadors being regular guests thanks to its location in the diplomatic enclave of Chanakyapuri, in Mumbai it is closer to Rs 4,500.
The other globally renowned restaurant in its fold is Megu, again in Delhi. Here, too, the first choice had been Nobu. Nair says Nobu had in fact visited their properties in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore but the deal became a casualty of the 26/11 terror attacks — Nobu could not convince his Japanese staff to relocate to India. But Dinesh is happy with the final choices and says restaurants contribute 30 per cent to the The Leela Palace Delhi’s revenue.
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Unlike brother Vivek, who has a degree in hotel management from Cornell University in the US and has been involved in the hotel business from its inception, Dinesh has had no formal training in the area he now looks after. “I didn’t do a course but being an avid traveller helps,” he says. Much to his daughter’s chagrin, the photos he takes while travelling are mostly of food, he says showing me image after image on his iPhone. “I photograph not just food but even things like a buffet counter that stands out, for example, which we may not have seen in India before.” His suggestions are executed by his wife, Madhu, who worked closely with the Four Seasons group for three years when The Leela was considering a tie-up with them. That, says Nair, was a fantastic foundation for the company. “When The Leela launches a project, the conceptualising and implementation is done by my wife and me, while my elder brother handles the finance and marketing.” The couple have a daughter, Samyukta, who holds a master’s degree from Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne and is now helping her mother.
The lack of formal training was no hindrance even when Jamavar was being set up, affirms Venkatesh Bhat, the corporate chef Nair hired from the Taj in Chennai to look after south Indian cuisine at the restaurant and who was with the group from 2001 to 2007. “He was very clear about what he wanted. There were five or six sampling sessions and he wanted to taste each and every dish that we made for the menu, and made a lot of corrections and suggestions” remembers Bhat, now CEO and corporate chef of the Accord Metropolitan group of hotels.
While Nair may trot the globe sampling haute cuisine, his favourite is much closer home, literally. “What I like the most — and is the most damaging — is home food, from Kerala. We have a chef trained by my mother and if I let myself go, I can put on at least 3 kg over a weekend,” he confesses. Sunday mornings in the bungalow he shares with his parents means appam and stew and fried Malabar prawns, while Saturday breakfast is puttu (rice flour and grated coconut steamed in a mould) and crab curry. The dining table is also where he often discusses company matters with his father, who may have officially retired but continues to look at overall strategy and positioning. “Even at the age of 93, he’s very sharp and understands all the nuances of the game,” says the son, with a hint of pride.
When asked about the traits he feels he has inherited from his father, a veritable legend in hotel circles, he mentions optimism and corporate aggression. “He gave me the confidence to take on competition head-on and become successful,” he says. His father has been very aggressive in expanding, but that has taken its toll also, he acknowledges. “We’ve now realised we should be a little more cautious, and we have to get our finances in order. These are lessons life has taught us.”
