I’m served fancy stir fry mushrooms in garlic sauce and Chinese style Okra. Sanjay treats himself to crackling chicken.Dressed in a pale blue T-shirt and white trousers, he isn’t the suave and forbidding ceo you expect him to be. For a ladies man—he carries a huge baggage of various liaisons with film personalities—Sanjay is candid and unassuming. Add another adjective—talkative—and you get the complete picture.
Sanjay inherited the business from his family which owns the Ambassador group of hotels but decided to get hands-on training at the Taj to learn the tricks of the trade. He waves away assumptions of being a gourmet. "There are only about five dishes that I eat over and over again and I know nothing about food. My sister Rachna looks into all that. I must have eaten only about 5 per cent of the stuff my restaurants offer. She tastes the other 95 per cent," he says. But it’s Sanjay who ends up getting all the credit.
But he loves the business of food. "I enjoy the excitement of putting up things and closing them down if necessary. Like everybody, I too make mistakes," he says.
So what are his food habits like? Breakfast for him consists of Frosties—the sugar-coated Kellogg’s cornflakes. "Once I travelled with 800 packets of Frosties and the Customs guys were very suspicious." Lunch consists of chicken made in a variety of ways and some salad. "Tomato soup is a must for me. I live off it," he adds. And dinner is always out.
Sanjay says his restaurants should seduce a middle-class family to eat out as much as possible. So his eateries like Dosa Diner/China Joe/Just Round the Corner cater to the common man’s pocket even as Tendulkar’s and Gordon House attract the rich and the famous. At the end of our hearty meal, he asks me to try the cakes at his Cake Khazana. Sanjay plans to have fifty outlets all over Mumbai. Quite a sweet temptation that!
