Stay Shay: ITC Grand Chola, Chennai

About a week ago, I was invited for an event at the ITC Grand Chola in Chennai. Having only seen pictures of the rooms on their website, I was eagerly looking forward to staying at the place and experiencing all that the hotel had to offer. Since there is too much too talk about, I’ll cover the awesome hotel first and then put up pictures of the delicious food I had there in the subsequent post.

The first thing that greeted us as we entered the hotel was the massive staircase at the reception. Defining absolute class, the staircase reminded me of the one from the Titanic movie where Leonardo Di Caprio is waiting at the bottom step and Kate Winslet walks down to greet him.

The reception area also has many of these nice little sitting areas for people to meet. These are spread across the ground floor. I want to steal one of those insanely comfortable chairs.

We were soon escorted to our rooms. I entered and the room simply blew my mind away. It took me almost ten minutes to sort of soak in how classy and cozy the room was. The room is well-sized and well lit. The cool part was that almost everything in the room was controlled by this nifty little ipad application. It controlled everything from room service, to the television, to setting the lights according to the mood you wanted (don’t get cheeky ideas here) and even the door locks. It pretty much controlled everything but the water taps. The bed was just so comfortable that I didn't want to move. I also had to put a leash on the child in me who wanted to jump up and down on the bed. (Yes, I still enjoy doing that.)

I always judge a hotel by the bathrooms they have. And the one here just took my already blown-apart mind, put it back together with super glue and blew it apart again. The bathroom had a luxurious bath tub, a separate shower area and a water closet. The sink area was opulent. And the best part, mirrors everywhere. While the bathroom was almost seamless with the rest of the room, one could pull the doors and then be enclosed in room with superb lighting and mirrors all around. This made the otherwise small bathroom seem really large. Kudos to the designer.

I really enjoy swimming. So, I checked out the pool area at the ITC Grand Chola. The pool area is well-laid out with a large pool in the center which is 4 feet deep, and smaller pools for the children on either side. And given the weather in Chennai, a dip in the pool is what the doctor ordered.

The ITC Grand Chola offers ten destinations for food and beverages. We ate at only two of them – The Madras Pavilion and the Cafe Mercara Express. I’ve put some pictures here, I’ll cover the food later on.

Madras Pavilion

Cafe Mercara

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The two days I spent at the ITC Grand Chola were one of the most memorable ones I’ve had in recent times. The staff was extremely courteous, rooms were very clean and the food was quite amazing. I thoroughly enjoyed my stay and look forward to stay there the next time.