Hyatt Regency!

There is no sincerer love than the love of food
                                                    -- George Bernard Shaw

 

 

I had an opportunity to have dinner at Hyatt Regency the one which is located in Anna Salai, Chennai. My team recently completed a herculean database migration activity from IBM's DB2 to Oracle DB implementing the Exadata infrastructure, so we had a nice team dinner at one of the finest places in chennai for dinner. 

                  Hyatt is situated right on the main road in Anna Salai, there are other big hotels also situated on this road like the CourtYard by Marriot, Raintree. Right now, anna salai is in a pretty bad shape, the roads are pathetically narrow, as the metro rail work is going on in full fledge. I initially thought that it will take atleast 1 hour for us to reach the hotel, as i left office (from Porur, DLF) at around 7.30 pm, but surprisingly we reached the destination in about 40 minutes. I am not really sure why but though it was a thursday there was not much traffic on the roads. 

                However i had to drive some distance crossing the hotel before i was allowed to take the U turn to reach the place, there are 2 entrances nearby, with big buses and cars moving around in the narrow road, i had be careful to get into the right one which leads into Hyatt, the other one is the entrance to Ramee Mall, which is the next building. 

             Inside the building as usual they did the usual bomb check, and i was allowed to enter. I stopped the car right in front of the entrance and gave the key to my car to the valet who offered to park my car. After another security check i was finally inside the hotel, the entrance was not very elegant, thought there was some kind of wierd hangings from the roof, which looked like it was inspired from some setting from an alien movie, it kept changing color and looked pretty cool, but was not having the opulence which the star hotels usually have. 

            We were directed to the buffet place which we had booked the previous day, the name of the restaurant was Spice, we had to take the lift to reach the L level where it was present. The atrium was amazingly decorated and looked very different from what we usually expect out of star hotels, it seemed like they had made use of some form of bee hive theme, we were able to see some fake bee hives hanging on different places, and there was a transparent stairs and elevater present which looked like a copy of the ones which we can find in apple stores.

            Spice had various other decorations in the restaurant which was a decent attempt to portray the place as Indian themed.  We were about 10 of us and unfortunate for us though we had booked table for 10 it was not available when we arrived, but the waitress was good enough to somehow arrange one for us in no time. The restaurant by itself was a huge place, and it looked like everyone who came to hyatt had dinner there. The courses were split into differnt tables, there was the main course, soups present in one table, the other one had different varieties of breads, salads, and other chat items. We were served with the starters in our tables. All of us were very hungry and the waiter brought very little to serve our appetite. We were not able to wait for long so we started with the main course, the taste of the food was good, but as usual we cannot expect much of variety from  buffet in star hotels. I had some mutton briyani, chicken curry, paneer butter masala, roti. I knew from previous experience that whenever one goes to an expensive hotel, it is not wise to hog the main course and fill the stomach, but one must chose the most delicious and rare food which will not be available everywhere, and relish eating that, so that is exactlty what i did. I had a slice of pork which i made into a sandwhich with some variety of bun, cheese and some vegetables. The dessert section was pretty awesome, i had 2 scoops of vanilla with chocolate syrup, and 2 other varieties of cakes which tasted real good.

Altogether we had a pleasant dinner at Hyatt, the bill was some 8.5K after the corporate discount, else it would have been 1.2k per head. We took some pictures standing before different backgrounds, Hyatt looked like a place which was a common hangout for celebrities and foreigners.

For the Soul:

1 Corinthians 10:31 - Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.