Madras Munchings

ITC Grand Chola

When we dined there during Christmas season, we never imagined it amidst a pandemic. Festivities unfurled with all the grandeur expected of this iconic Chennai institution.
On Christmas Eve, Chef Zubin Writer at Ottimo Cucina Italiana customised seven courses. But we prescribe seven courses of only margherita, the one he learned to make at a Naples restaurant, whose pizza sales were so stupendous they paid the Mafia to let them operate after hours… Finish off with seven courses of tiramisu – one of the two best in town. After seven courses of pizza and seven more of tiramisu you’d better have stayed up night-long doing push-ups to avail of the banquet masquerading as brunch that Chef Ashish Singh unleashed at Pan Asian. Chef dispatches to your table neatly dispositioned themed items – a medley of salads followed by a mélange of fried starters, then sushi, then Dim sum, etc, etc. Each time Chef manifests, elaborating on the exotic ingredients deployed in dishes. But more tickling than the hot-sour Bangkok soup are his tales – like when he was stranded up on Mount Fuji. This Chef who realises that those making the most noise don’t necessarily make the best food also appreciates that COVID occasioned return to a saner way of living – like eating bajri rotis cooked on open fires in his village outside Lucknow! Ask him if he knows how to make Lucknowi biryani, he quips, “I know how to eat it but not how to make it!” Yet, it is medu vadai that he has exerted efforts on: 50 attempts, he confesses, flopped.
As we leave he says we must return to discover the 300 dishes on his menu. “We’ll return for your medu vadai,” we wink. We’ll certainly return for the Christmas goodies this year – terrific Christmas pudding and Chennai’s finest mince pies cupped in crumble-at-touch pastry. Guest Relations Manager, Brinda Das, grace and graciousness incarnate, who received us with, “Welcome back home!” awaits us at departure, poised like a Chola bronze, bearing a gargantuan box of Christmas goodies bigger than the car come for our pick-up (The Chola’s hospitality is legendary). The car simply won’t accommodate the enormous gift. So the canny Brinda waives her magic wand, transforming the Christmas hamper into a chocolate hamper from Fabelle, the gourmet pâtisserie. If the dark chocolates herald the excellence to expect at Easter there is only one place in Chennai to be on Easter Weekend and it IS the ITC Grand Chola.
And then you must order house-speciality Tawon. To find out what this sweetest of all the hotel’s offerings is, you will have to read Part II of our Tryst of Taste with this hotel.

No 63, Anna Salai, Little Mount, Guindy, Chennai 600032
Ph: 044 2220 0000
Meal for two: Rs 5000 + taxes, without achohol