BENGALURU: A Tale of Two Cities
“A Tale of Two Cities” perhaps best captures Bengaluru’s rather schizophrenic personality which straddles buzzing, bar-filled, business-driven metropolis and serene “Garden City.” This Southern Indian city is fondly called “Garden City” after Emperor Tipu Sultan who, inspired by Persian gardens, endowed it with a flourish of gardens. An extraordinary feature of Bengaluru is that it abounds in exclusive hotels that lend themselves to the business traveller or the luxury traveller. Few cities are as dynamic and yet afford that delicious sense of dépaysement.
The Oberoi, Bengaluru
A 31 year old property, The Oberoi, seems to have been around forever, conjuring as it does a hypnotic vintage feel, a “Grand Dame” appeal.
With the first step into the hotel you’ll be greeted with a quintessentially, emblematically crisp “Oberoi-ness” escort for the city’s slickest check-in. Enveloped in fragranced air you’ll be on to your luxurious accommodations. If it is a Sunday EAM Akshay Chonkar waylays you for Sunday Brunch. For this exalted Sunday ritual be decked in apparel worthy of Monte-Carlo. Akshay himself with his slick suits and classy ties is Oberoi elegance incarnate.
As you make your way past glass-encased corridors to rooms with terraces perched over majestic gardens, it feels like you are levitating on a cloud of verdure. Balconies in a gurgle of Bougainville contemplate the glorious gardens. As you imbibe your room with genuine wood-paneled floors and genuine all-wood furniture it seems the garden has been ushered indoors. Bathrooms in marble stock Forest Essential toiletries curated exclusively for Oberoi Hotels.
Verandas open onto gardens galore swooning in the scent of exuberant fauna. Brunch unfurls at all-day dining restaurant Lapis and spills over into the trendy Wabi Sabi adjoining restaurant. Soon young sommelier Harshith Prabhu is popping the champagne! Everyone’s got a champagne flute in hand, ladies with solitaire-clad fingers curled around the bubbly rosé. Next, Akshay has you touring a carnival of culinary delights prepared at live counters outdoors amidst a spirit of mirthful decorum- this is, after all, The Oberoi.
Hazard a comment that these gardens are quite the place for a garden party and Pinky Padmaraj from The Oberoi regards you scandalised. “This IS The Oberoi.” And The Oberoi is about poise and staid surrounds.
By evening, the city’s beautiful people descend for supper at the famous open-air Thai restaurant Rim Naam encrusted in the soaring midst of the enchanted gardens.
Every evening at the hotel must perforce inaugurate at The Polo Club which exudes colonial charm. You can sit and sip on its exquisite verandas or out on the lawns remarking that the hotel’s F&B outlets are concatenated like dining carriages in a luxury train and it seems you are voyaging past vast vistas of green. Seasonal, botanically inspired cocktails capture the gardens in a glass. After a few of these cocktails and a helluva lot of cheese toast plump with thick fluffs of cheese Wabi Sabi beckons for supper.
Wabi Sabi supposedly embraces life’s inherent imperfections but you’d find few at this epicurean restaurant offering eclectic Japanese and Chinese cuisine. Ruby Gold Pillows, soft cushions of red dim sum, are gorgeous. Harshith emerges to pair wines on a 7-course degustation but is deftly intercepted by mixologist Rahul Tiwari and his crafty cocktails like the Enali (yuzu, elderflower, gin, ginger ale).
Then wake to breakfast on the garden terraces of Lapis. You suddenly look up from your heaped plate to see someone who seems a prince striding towards you. “Is my hair looking ok?,” you wonder panic-stricken. The “Prince” presents himself. He is Amit Khare the GM. But of course. He has that inimitable Oberoi stride, stance, grace about him.
Over a long weekend you’d mistake this hotel in central Bengaluru for a far-away resort as guests languish in the embowers of heady trees by the hushed pool.
As you circumambulate the lawns, strolling past the towering 1500-year-old Rain Tree, stopping, stooping at a pond where dragon flies kiss blooming lotuses and frogs mate in the blazing sunshine you’d think you’re in the Garden of Eden. Pinky had said this paradisal setting, lends itself to reading. Instead, you see people ambling with mobiles, but you don’t hear them. This is, after all, The Oberoi.
Come Monday morning, the leisure crowd evaporates and businessmen appear in sharp suits, intently talking shop curled over dangerously buttered local specialities benne dosa, as they breakfast in the overwhelming arch of a crisscross of poetry in green.
For rate visit: oberoihotels.com/hotels-in-bengaluru
The Leela Bhartiya City Bengaluru
There are “Wine Hotels” and then there are hotels with wine created exclusively for them. This young hotel is one such. Even the only such in India boasting Falak wine, exclusive to the hotel, which was exclusively commissioned for the hotel’s eponymous fine dining Indian restaurant Falak.
Imagined as a contemporary palace, the hotel opens into a vast lobby showcasing modern art and stylish chandeliers but otherwise uncluttered. It’s a palace for a youthful prince although princes of the more august variety regard you austerely from gilded portraits in the lavish crimson-walled Library Bar. The princes, however, seem to approve the signature cocktails you sip like bewitchingly pretty Blue Floral Gin Tonic comprising blue pea tea.
This “modern palace” is a business hotel luring long-stay expats with its plush suites and bathrooms redolent with lush Tishya toiletries created by The Leela for The Leela. Yet, the hotel never fails to impress that the Garden City of Bengaluru is where work and play coexist androgynously.
The story goes that The Leela Bhartiya City opened audaciously during the Pandemic in a far-flung part of town. Young Rohit Pandey, then the hotel manager, spent the time the Pandemic afforded at India’s oldest vineyard and created Falak wine. Rohit deployed his experiences from exotic private island resorts in the Seychelles, Maldives etc, to curate a bespoke experience on land. So, the hotel whisks you 45 mins out of Bengaluru to Grover vineyard to taste the two Falak wines, a chardonnay and a blend of shiraz and cabernet sauvignon. Rohit had envisaged you visit the vineyard with an entourage including private butler, private chef and private sommelier with whom to process after the wine tasting to lunch amidst the vines where the chef cooks for you, the sommelier wine-pairs and the butler spoils you silly. Alas, the vineyard enforces its own not-terribly-exciting lunches on visitors so The Leela’s picnic box with which your butler is armed is welcome, especially if it bears gourmet avocado and blue cheese on fresh-baked sourdough bread.
You’re pencilled in for supper at phenomenal Falak as part of Rohit’s exclusive “Falak” food & wine adventure. So it’s a good idea to glamour up at the spa whose manager Ranjitha Alva, tranquility personified, has a tranquillising effect easing the tautest knots (mental and corporeal). No need for a massage! You still need that burnishing Thalgo Marine Ritual facial though- after all, you’re dining with Prince Charming, AKA Falak’s celebrity Chef Farman Ali.
Spruced up, you hit the glass-encased Falak bar lounge with swooping city views. You can have only so many cocktails and canapés before the eminently adorable Chef Farman takes you in, not without ceremony, to sup. Unleash 13 courses of North West Frontier and Awadhi cuisine heralded by plethoric kebabs. Follows a sumptuous thali of Indian breads, rich curries and biriyanis fragrantly nuanced with spices, apotheosising in Dal-e-Falak. With celebrity comes pernickety and Chef Farman, as humble as he is famous, insists on cottage cheese and ghee flown over from Punjab and papad from Delhi to impart gourmet razzmatazz to his creations. Allowed. After all, he was extracted out of retirement to mastermind a menu of originality for Falak. Supper pairs marvellously with Falak wines whose excellences are such that over a blind-tasting including international wines, even French, in the same price range connoisseurs adjudicated Falak the winner.
The hotel’s mocktails have their own seductions and seem a devious project to ensnare you into lingering on for a detox sojourn. Other seductions include Pan Asian restaurant The Lotus Oriental whose hakka noodles, Asian veggies in black bean sauce and Chocolate & Mandarin cheesecake are so good you return the same evening for the very same dishes. The all-day-dining restaurant offers signature Leela Aujasya health breakfast. But it’s much better to feast on South Indian breakfast specialities. The mall adjoins the hotel giving you just enough to time to pick up something sexy for your lunch picnic in the gardens the hotel overlooks. Opens the picnic hamper and out pop goodies galore and lots more Falak wine. Cheers!
Executive Suite from USD 400
theleela.com/the-leela-bhartiya-city-bengaluru
JW Marriott Bengaluru Golfshire Resort & Spa
It’s got Glamour. It’s got Golf. It’s got Gourmet glory. And the stupendously good spa is another story. This is Bengaluru’s latest pleasure playground. It apparently has facilities for those who need to, em, “work” (dirty word in these pleasurely purlieus) but the resort’s seductions derail even the most inveterate workaholic’s sedulity. With this spectacular number featuring a racy lobby and pool worthy of Bali Marriott has penetrated rarefied realms on Bengaluru’s hospitality scene. Weekends get chaotic and long weekends are sheer carnage as Bengaluru’s leisure lovers compete with the golfing set who land up from across India and abroad for a spot of golf interspersed between long sessions at East.
East’s Pan Asian cuisine effected by an expat chef can elevate itself to refinement that reflects the ambiance and evoking a luxury yacht-like feel by day, opening as it does onto a waterbody. You’ll want to linger into sunset over more than reasonable helpings of homemade ice cream and desserts. It’s best not to abort an arduously procured spa appointment, especially when you have Balinese therapists rolling golf balls soothingly on your fragrantly and unctuously oiled body. It’s worth luxuriating in the becalming envelope of this therapeutic space which is a Destination Spa, surely.
Be sure to have a siesta before supper at Aaleeshaan as you have a looooong night ahead at this Royal Indian speciality restaurant that is nothing if not GRAND as its name trumpets. Whilst Lucknow’s kebabs and curries with varietal breads and biriyanis are the signature dishes and a young Lucknowi chef can curate a immense Daawat-e-Aaleeshaan menu, you could well opt for a liquid diet mostly comprising that tantalising tomato rasam. And outside is lap of more liquid luxury to imbibe from Aaleeshaan’s terrace: the sapphire pool twinkling under the star-sprayed skies is like a tableau reflecting the tree that looms handsomely over it. Come morning, amidst the frenzy of breakfast at all-day dining Aviary the placid young Kuldeep Rawat, who looked after you so well at East, devotes himself to your table as if you alone were breakfasting al fresco as 1000 guests rush upon the buffet to demolish its goodies as soon as they are replenished!
Garden Terrace Room from USD 350
https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/blrnh-jw-marriott-bengaluru-prestige-golfshire-resort-and-spa
Shangri-La Bengaluru
One of the privileges and pleasures of checking into a suite at the Shangri-La Bengaluru is not just the suite’s immensity which beggars competition but Club Lounge access, a passport to delectable teatime and cocktail hour indulgences. You can breakfast in exclusivity too in the lounge perched high up above the city but who would when Bengaluru’s most ample and excellent breakfast buffet rages on at b Cafe. To b or not b a cafe… By no stretch of imagination can this b a cafe! It is a tremendous pulsating sprawl of gourmandise. The Indian counter is topnotch athrob with North Indian specialities whose only rival is the local South Indian fare. Come Sunday there’s no busier place in Bengaluru as queues meander to access the gargantuan brunch whose dessert counter hasn’t an equal in the city. Unless you have a lunchtime tryst with the Dragon at Shang Palace where Chinese Hot Pot rages fierily on. You’d want to return to sup on the Tasting Menu, a fiesta of rich cantonese and Sichuan- that’s if you manage to get beyond Chef Mann’s melt-in-your-mouth dim sums of unmatched delicacy. Translucent pouches of Edamame Truffle dim sum are the show-stoppers. The concierge might, however, protest they too put on a good show of curating a city tour when they dispatch you to the famous Botanical Gardens in a Mercedes Benz. That the Shangri-La is the city’s favourite dining address attest thronging crowds processing towards its many and varietal dining venues. Indian speciality Ssaffron’s opulent thali is especially popular. But Caprese boasts Italian cuisine that seems like it flew over from Tuscany. Truly, it does! And terrace top Hype has the sharpest cocktails in town, worth all the hype and the high. Once you’ve cavorted around the hotel’s culinary carnival encompassing global cuisines -Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Italian- you feel this hotel tells a tale of not just two cities but of many cities!
CHUTTERSNAP
Premier Suite from USD 350
shangri-la.com/bengaluru/shangrila
Four Seasons Hotel Bengaluru at Embassy ONE
It’s brisk and businesslike. And yet… It emphatically conveys that Bengaluru is India’s “Garden City” through swish gardens including undulating Ribbon Gardens whilst vertical gardens carpet sleek grey outdoors walls. The design element itself cleverly fuses business hotel with luxury resort. The latter of India’s only two Four Seasons, the hotel’s grand launch was Pandemic-smothered. But the subsequently unveiled smashing Presidential Suite, one of the city’s two priciest, endows it with the kudos befitting a Four Seasons. Rooms boast floor-to-ceiling glass and the niftiest Bond-style bathroom fittings. The tall dark and handsome 21st Floor Asian restaurant Far & East is the place to be seen and lounge-bar Copitas is an international award-winner. But the best-kept secret is the vibrant salad counter at all-day dining CURE8 which assembles produce as zesty as the Bengaluru weather. Lunch on salads so you can attack the French-style desserts guiltless. And if nobody else says so, this hotel’s Infuse Spa, which ushers in the immersive feel of the pool stretched longly outside, reconfirms vigorously why Four Seasons spas are amongst the world’s best, if not the best!
