On The Day After National Public Relations Day, Spare A Thought for Hospitality PRs

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

WHENEVER Richa Sharma of ITC Hotels sends me a 'thank you' text early in the morning for a cheeky story I may have written about Bukhara, or some other pet peeve, I can feel the searing heat of her irony. I call her up at once, she makes her point, and then it's business as usual.

Having known Richa from her days as the country's first celebrity television news anchor (when Zee News ruled the ratings) to the present, when she's the national head of PR of a hotel chain that takes media reports about it a bit too seriously, I know, and I know she knows, that if there's a more thankless profession than journalism, it is hospitality industry PR.

Richa Sharma's Facebook profile
picture seemed to me to be a
telling comment on the fuzzy
status of the PR person in
the hospitality business

It was National Public Relations Day yesterday, so it set me thinking about the people who keep calling me, texting me or emailing me every day, feeding my exaggerated sense of self-importance, asking me to review restaurants or attend food promotions, or sometimes, grace hotel and restaurant openings, or better still, go on an outstation junket. The older I get, the less inclined I am to accept invitations to places where I know I won't get a good meal. Earlier, I would just flatly, sometimes rudely, say 'no'; now, I try to come up with inventive excuses.

My latest didn't work. The other day, I met this bright young man named Akshat, well brought-up and polite without being grovelling in the fake PR sort of way. When he was pressing me hard to review a new restaurant, which must have become old by now, I said I had decided to stop eating out. He took one good look at me, laughed out loud, and said, "No sir, that can't be possible." Well, now that the world assumes that I live to eat, and now that I have to keep playing this cat-and-mouse game with PRs because I am left with no other option, let me share my thoughts on the people whom food journos need all the time, no matter how much we may deny the fact.

Hotel PRs can never please anyone, especially their own F&B guys, because the human appetite for the spotlight is limitless. Even if they get the respect of their colleagues, the world doesn't get to know the work they put in to create stars. As I keep telling Mukta Kapoor of Old World Hospitality, Manish Mehrotra owes a substantial part of his fame to her efforts to market his exception talents at a time when he was an unknown chef in a restaurant that used to be empty even on a good day. Yes, I am talking about Indian Accent five years ago.

In hotels where the F&B guys are bright and communicative, as in the instances of Soumya Goswami at The Oberoi New Delhi, Rajesh Namby of The Leela Palace New Delhi and Tanveer Kwatra at Pullman Gurgaon Central Park, the PRs have to work overtime to be taken seriously by their sub-set of contacts. Deepti Uppal of The Leela Palace, though, doesn't have to make that effort. Nor does Deepica Sarma at The Oberoi. But Tanveer definitely deserves a doubling of his salary because of the effort he invests in popularising his hotel!

The PRs also have to contend with another, greater, internal challenge. Their bosses, I know for a fact, are in love with international PR agencies, because they get gora journos on junkets to write glowingly about their host hotels after being wined and dined by the local PR resources. Good publicity in the international media is worth several times more than the money a hotel might spend to get gora journos over -- and the poor local resource who put in 16-hour days to wine and dine the junketeers is forgotten in the afterglow of a splash in the North American and European editions of Conde Nast Traveler.

If the poor local resource manages good local media for free (which is becoming increasingly hard in the time of paid media), the chefs walk away with the credit. If a hotel, however, lands in a mess because of a prostitution ring being busted, or a man deciding to jump to his death from its 17th floor, or an IPL after party going bad, and the name of the place gets mentioned even once, then I would rather be in a deserted island with Osama Bin Laden than be the PR of that hotel.

I have lost count of the number of times PRs have called me to get their hotel's name dropped in a crime story. I have invariably obliged because I believe that if a hotel did not actively aid and abet a murder or a freelance escort, it should be left out of the glare of bad publicity. It should be taken to the cleaners, however, if there's a case of food poisoning or bad service. Of course, in this day and age of the social media and citizen journalism, hotels should give up the fond hope of their fair name not being dragged through the mud in the public domain.

When I first started writing about food, I would be chaperoned by PRs who used to remind me of my Science teachers in school -- of course, I was a young man then and would have surely enjoyed their company now! They oozed sweetness, but they controlled, like mother eagles, access to even the doorman as if he was privy to some state secret.

In those dreary days, I would pray for an invitation to the Taj Mahal Hotel because Vandana Ranganathan (who has since left the hotel industry -- not because of me! -- and even re-married) could at least share stories (never gossip!) about the theatre world, which was her second life. Madhulika Bhattacharya, who would entertain us with her mellifluous voice and her quirky sense of humour, was briefly the light of our lives, first at the ITC Maurya and then at The Park, but then she opted for happy domesticity with my good friend, Aman Dhall, India's foremost wine importer. L. Aruna Dhir was another exception who stood out in the crowd till she opted out, not only because of her exceptional grasp over the English language (she is gifted poet too), but also because of her unfailing sense of humour.

I don't know what has happened, but as the years progress, and the industry grows to unprecedented levels, the PRs are getting younger, sassier and definitely more professional. Some years back, I was particularly impressed by Pallavi Singh, who manages the PR of the two Crowne Plaza addresses in Okhla and Gurgaon, after she passed on information that I had forgotten to add in a restaurant review, and which I had noticed just as the pages were going to bed, at 11 p.m. She was half-asleep, but she called the hotel, got the information and passed it on to me. That, for me, was a wow example of professionalism.

The trio of The Oberoi's PRs -- Silki Sehgal (who I have seen grow in stature, and how!), Deepica Sarma and Mallika Dasgupta -- are textbook examples of professional finesse. Madhur Madaan of the Kempinski Ambience and Nidhi Budhia of Crowne Plaza Rohini get my vote for doing a great job of putting their respective hotels on the mindspace of Delhi-NCR's media-consuming public. Madhur, of course, is lucky to have Vella Ramaswamy as her General Manager -- I always look forward to an invitation to dine with him.

Nidhi Verma of The Leela Ambience Gumrgaon is the other PR whose understated efficiency is complemented by a General Manager (Michel Koopman), an Executive Chef (Ramon Salto Alvarez) and an Executive Sous Chef (Kunal Kapur of MasterChef India fame), who are pros at having the media eat out of their hands. Unfortunately, Reema Chawla, formerly of the Taj Palace and Vivanta by Taj Gurgaon-NCR, has moved on to another line of business. She has always impressed me with her sunny disposition and competence at work. It'll be hard to find a replacement for her.

Before I sign off, and although I have steered clear of PR agencies, I must mention Neeta Raheja and Pareina Thapar's Very Truly Yours, which has a host of F&B accounts. What I like about them is that they create excitement in their communications about the restaurants they handle and their juniors, luckily for us, don't exist in some other universe. Their one-time colleague, Sonali Sokhal, who now has her own agency, Intelliquo, brings to the table that winsome quality. And of course, my last sentence must belong to my favourite upcoming PRs working with impersonal agencies. They are without doubt Muddassar Alvi (Avian Media), Daisy Basumatary (Perfect Relations), Ruchika Gupta (PR Pundit), Zainab Kanthawala (El Sol) and Akshat Kapoor (Goodword). If their tribe grows, journalists won't ever dodge the calls of PRs.

Dried Ants, Chillies Galore and Much More at The Leela Gurgaon's Fiesta Latina

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

The Leela Gurgaon's Executive Chef, Ramon
Salto Alvarez, has put together Fiesta Latina, which
is being billed as India's first Latin American food
festival. It features celebrity chefs from Colombia,
Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru.

WHEN Gerardo Vasquez Lugo landed in Delhi a couple of nights ago, he had no change of clothes in his baggage, for there was room only for ingredients he had flown in from Mexico for what is possibly Delhi-NCR's first exposure to the vast wealth of Latin American cuisines at The Leela Gurgaon.

When The Leela Gurgaon's good-humoured general manager, Michel Koopman, brought in Ramon Salto Alvarez, the jolly Catalan chef who started out as an apprentice at Ferran Adria's El Bulli in 1993 and was heading Austrian-American super chef Jean Georges Vongerichten's restaurants at the W Doha before moving base, we knew there would be lots of action.

It took Chef Ramon, whose Latin American connection is his Colombian wife, four months to conceptualise a celebration of food and wine to coincide with the Fiesta Latina dance festival. It took a presentation made by him over breakfast to convince ambassadors of the 19 Latin American countries represented in New Delhi that they were on to a good thing. "Five of them hadn't even been to Gurgaon till that day," Koopman said with that unmissable twinkle in his eye. "It was like the Wild West for them." After Fiesta Latina, which will be on from April 5 to 19 at the hotel's all-day multi-cuisine restaurant, Spectra, Gurgaon will cease to be a stranger for Delhi-NCR's Latin American community.

The results of Chef Ramon's hard work are there for all of us to see, all labelled and stacked neatly on open shelves in his office. These are ingredients that have travelled half-way across the world with five visiting chefs from countries whose food not many of us have had the chance to sample. Chef Ramon's shelves have dried ants, chantaduro (peach palm) and panderito biscuits waiting to be used by the Colombian chef, Vicky Acosta, who's young and bubbly but already a celebrity in her home town Cali. She draws her ingredients and influences equally from the Pacific Ocean and her country's African heritage.

The shelves are also filled up with 25 kilos of pastes of different kinds of chillies, which have come with the ambassador of Peruvian cuisine, Javier Ampuero, whose magical bag has quinoa in eight different colours and ingredients such as purple sweet corn paste and papa seca (dried potatoes), which he requires to showcase his country's Nikkei cuisine, which marries the cooking styles of his country's Peruvian and Japanese communities.

Javier Ampuero, who's regarded as Peru's
culinary ambassador, will present his brand of
Nikkei cuisine, which marries Peruvian and
Japanese gastronomic traditions. Peru has a
large Japanese community and has even
elected a president of Japanese origin.

Chef Gerardo, with whom I started my story, has come with about a dozen different kinds of chillies plus bags full of nopales (prickly pear cactus), poblano chilli peppers, avocado leaves and dried persimmon powder. Amaranth and chia seeds are the other goodies in his bag, and he's ready to reveal how far they can go  And yes, the first thing he did after landing in Delhi was to go and buy a wardrobe for himself at Ambience Mall, Gurgaon, followed by Dilli Haat. "You wouldn't have had chillies without Mexico," the chef said with a gentle smile, underlining the culinary links between two great ancient civilisations that know so little about each other.

Just like Chef Gerardo, the guru of traditional Mexican cuisine, who draws his inspiration from the culinary legacies of the ancient Olmec, Mayan, Zapotec and Purepecha cultures, Ines Paes Nin ('Chef Tita') from the Dominican Republic is the young pioneer of the New Dominican Cuisine, which has brought local produce and traditional cuisines back in fashion in her Caribbean island nation, where Christopher Columbus landed in 1492 to start the saga of the New World.

Likewise, Chef Felipe Rivandeneira from Ecuador is the quintet's other young gastronomic guru. The chef still had his carry-on bag with him when I met him and heard him talk excitedly about New Andean Cuisine and the unique gastronomic tradition of the enchanted island of Galapagos, where Darwin had found the evidence he needed for his theory of evolution.

Delhi has had infrequent exchanges with Latin American culture. New Delhi is the only city in the world outside Mexico to have a street named after one of its nation builders, Benito Juarez. Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz, who lived in Delhi as Mexico's ambassador to India in 1962-65, completed two of his acclaimed works -- El mono gramático (The Monkey Grammarian) and Ladera este (Eastern Slope) -- during his stint here and had a profound impact on the Bengali poets and writers who called themselves the 'Hungry Generation' or 'Hungryalists'.

In an earlier stint in India, when he was first secretary at the Embassy of Mexico in the early 1950s, a lesser-known Paz had facilitated a scholarship for Satish Gujral to study under the Mexican masters, Diego Rivera and David Sequeiros, and the young painter was an eyewitness to the combustible relationship between Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, with the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky also choosing to fish in these troubled waters.

The closest we got to experiencing Latin American food was courtesy of Saeed Sherwani, now the president of the Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI), who opened what must have been the country's first Tex-Mex restaurant, Rodeo, in Connaught Place, in 1994. In the early days of the restaurant, the Mexican chefs Roberto Treves and Sergio Snyder -- two gentlemen whom I won't ever be able to forget -- kept showing up at regular intervals at its kitchen, and they were the ones who were introduced us to the mole poblano, with which they cooked chicken.

Delhi never quite fell in love with Mexico's national dish, but 20 years on, with our taste buds having evolved dramatically and with Nobu putting Peruvian Nikkei cuisine on the world map, we seem to be ready for the fiesta that Chef Ramon and the five Latin American chefs now in residence at The Leela Gurgaon are about to lay out for us.