Return of Connaught Place as Delhi's original party place

About a year back, I had written about the dramatic transformation of Connaught Place, which had seen five hellish years before and after the star-crossed 2010 Commonwealth Games. It has truly become the city's premier retail and entertainment mall, which it was designed to be from the day it opened in 1933.

Besides being the world's fourth most expensive retail destination, it is home to scores of new restaurants that have sprung up in spaces squatted upon for decades by rogue tenants. Connaught Place today, according to industry estimates, has become a Rs 78-crore-a-month food and beverage economy, looking at raking in Rs 120 crore a month this year. That would make it a Rs 1,440-crore F&B cash machine catering to the humongous appetite for "hanging out" of the millennial generation.

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Just to give you an idea of the concentration of new restaurants in Connaught Place, here's another bit of statistics: N-Block, which used to have just a sleepy Amber and Blues, and Taste of China briefly, to flaunt, is home today to 15-plus restaurants, the latest being MTV's Flyp, the music channel's first foray into the food and beverage business in the world. On busy nights, restaurants owners inform me, just this block, which has Moet's kulfiwallah and Barbecue Nation rubbing shoulders with a host of similar-sounding restaurants operated by Priyank Sukhija, sees as many as 2,000 people congregate to let their hair down.

The terrace of this block, which used to be occupied by the decrepit Centre Court Hotel, is today one of the city's most sought-after destinations. And with the NDMC appearing to have withdrawn its hare-brained diktat of not allowing restaurants to operate their terraces, Connaught Place has become one large open-air party zone - notwithstanding the particulate matter load carried by the city's air!

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The freeing up of Connaught Place has made Delhi the party capital of India. The only incongruities in this buzzy landscape are the Indian Coffee House, which is stuck in another era, and Standard restaurant at the Regal theatre, where I have had many a celebratory meal with the my parents and sister, and even dated the young woman who became my wife a quarter of a century ago - the grand old restaurant went out of business more than a decade ago, but it has not found a taker, so all that remains of it is the signage and the shell of its once proud self.

The new-found importance of Connaught Place in our lives has been reaffirmed by the opening of two of Delhi-NCR's phenomenally successful restaurants. Farzi Cafe, whose success at DLF Cyber Hub, Gurgaon, owes a lot to the young Zorawar Kalra's vision of giving Indian food the contemporary twist his generation is most comfortable with, has opened at E-Block. Social, another restaurant that the millennial generation has instantly adopted, has planted its flag at Odeon cinema.

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The two heavyweight restaurant openings are an affirmation of the altered status of Connaught Place.

For generations of Dilliwalas, British architect Robert Tor Russell's immortal gift to the city has been for decades the destination for celebratory meals. And the good news is that the old immortals are still in business - from Wenger's (which has been around for 90 years) to Kwality (which has turned 75), United Coffee House and The Embassy, to Amber, Anand Restaurant, Berco's, English Dairy and Vega Pure Vegetarian at Hotel Alka, where the first helping of each dish served to customers is still offered to the presiding deity. You can't write off Connaught Place. It always comes back to reclaim its place in history.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)