Highway hospitality

First it was Chateau Indage, the Pune-based wine company, that opened a wine bar and restaurant at one of its vineyards on the Nasik-Pune highway, for travellers to match food with the company's brand of wines.

Now, up north, another liquor house, the Rs 300-crore Mount Shivalik Breweries, is getting ready to enter the hospitality business in a big way. On the anvil is a chain of highway restaurants. Or more correctly, pub-cum-restaurants.

That's not all. Another big project in the pipeline is a group of heritage properties in Rajasthan that Mount Shivalik plans to run as "boutique hotels".

Talks are apparently on with at least three parties and the project is expected to take off soon.

Meanwhile, Mount Shivalik's first highway outlet has come up at Behrore on the Delhi-Jaipur highway.

In fact, the company took over the operations and management of the Rajasthan Tourism Development Corporation-run joint at Behrore when it was privatised.

The outlet called Thunder Point, isn't a one-off operation. In the next two months, the company plans to open another joint in the north.

Monish Bali, director marketing, Mount Shivalik, says that a total of five highway restaurants are on the anvil, "three in the north and then we may go to Maharsahtra, on the Bombay-Pune highway."

Bali believes that the time to enter the highway hospitality business is ripe as the highways are becoming better than before with four and six-lane highways coming up.

Though Bali is unwilling to divulge the total investment earmarked for his hospitality business, he admits that each highway restaurants will cost around Rs 60-70 lakh to set up.

The amount per outlet is similar to another hospitality chain the group entered "" the O Briens chain of "lifestyle cafes".

A couple of months ago, the company opened the first O Briens, an Irish sandwich chain, with two other partners.

There are plans to open at least 30 such outlets in the country in the next three years with the help of franchisees. The company's second outlet is being readied in Gurgaon.

That the hospitality foray is being planned in a big way can be gauged from the fact that the company has hired a former ITC professional Virender S Datta as vice-president to oversee its activities in the area.

The company's one-year-old chocolates business, is also looking up. In a tie up with designer Raghavendra Rathore, the company has been marketing Les Chocolates du Jodhpur.

According to Bali, the business has grown four folds since its inception with the help of various corporate tieups.