‘The Duchess Of Coonoor’ Celebrates Her 80th Birthday!

Stanley Pinto, gourmet, traveller, aficionado of all things exquisite, has an envious list of interesting friends. Zerina Burns is one of his most favourites!

She is the great great great great grand-daughter of Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, the first ever Indian baronet knighted by Queen Victoria, and great great grand-daughter of Sir Pherozeshah Mehta. No wonder Zerina Burns’ friends call her The Duchess of Coonoor.  And her 80th birthday party celebration in Bangalore lived up to that appellation. It was, to put it simply, unforgettable. But to begin at the beginning.

Zerina’s foray into gourmet wining and dining began when, at age eight, she had her first ever celebration of the good life, in London. The then head of the Tata operations in the UK, her grand-uncle Kaikobad Pherozeshah Mehta, treated the family to a dinner that ought to have been impossible in post-WWII London. “Ah, the Sole Meuniere and medallions of beef stuffed with Portobello mushrooms,” she tells me. “They were accompanied by Pommery champagne, a 1937 Chateau Haut-Brion Semillon and a Chateau Margaux.” (By a wonderful coincidence, last year we were guests of my friends Prince Robert of Luxembourg at his Haut-Brion winery and Thibault Pontallier at Ch Margaux, in Bordeaux).

She recalls asking grand-uncle if this was what was called the “nectar of the gods” and when her mother objected to such a young girl being treated to wine, he shut her up fast by saying “No one was too young to learn about the finer things in life.”

How could she remember the menu and the event seventy years later, I ask Zerina. “You might say it equalled St Paul seeing the light... it was when I became discerning about the joys of life,” she tells me, her eyes sparkling at the memory of it.    

And now here she was, on her 80th birthday, celebrating as only a Duchess would, in the most stylish ballroom of Bangalore. Her ninety-five guests, arrived from Coonoor and several parts of the globe, first got a sense of it all as they walked up The Leela Palace Hotel’s chandeliered and marbled stairway. Welcoming them at the top was a photographer who snapped them against a backdrop specially designed for the occasion. (They were further surprised when, at the end of the dinner, they collected a copy of their photographs elegantly framed as a takeaway souvenir).

And seated at fifteen round tables in the spectacular ballroom of the hotel, we were regaled to a five course French dinner, each course paired with a glass of Krsma, India's finest wines, delivered by twenty elegant white-gloved servers resplendent in black walking in line to deliver each course and then to clear it when we were done with it... it was a sight to behold.

Chef Mir Zafar Ali, always in a class of his own, outdid himself, with his service staff delivering the superb dinner to each table simultaneously, in military precision that a former General of the Indian Army, present at the party, wondered if his corps could have done better. The piece de resistance was a special twenty foot cake carried in from the kitchen by the entire legion of chefs, led by lady chefs flashing Diwali sparklers!

The dress code for the evening was Black Tie or Bandh Gala for men; how could it be otherwise? The ladies were required merely to be gorgeous, and of course they were. There were more diamonds sparkling in that ballroom than you might find on a good day at Tiffany's! And none of them were draped more spectacularly than on the birthday girl herself.

This was an event to be long remembered. The hills around Coonoor, where Zerina Burns lives in her spectacular home “The Duchy” (what else!) are echoing with the wonder of it.