THE Lords Park Inn at Surat, a property belonging to Anil Madhok�s Sarovar Park Plaza group of hotels, resorts and restaurants, is located conveniently enough just opposite the Surat Railway Station. Just as your train is pulling into the station, if you look out towards the west, you will see the hotel rising in black and white before you. It is a simple and comfortable property, 110 rooms, two suites, the room tariff ranging from Rs. 2,300 for a standard single room to Rs. 3,100 for a superior double room. The suites cost Rs. 10,000. And in exchange for these modest rates, the Lords Park Inn offers a Copper Chimney restaurant with a multi-cuisine menu, swimming pool, a business centre with secretarial services, 24-hours laundry, and banqueting for upto 400 people.

Anil Kumar, the jovial and helpful general manager here, says that the big draw to the Lords Park Inn is its Copper Chimney restaurant. �The restaurant is so popular and famous in Surat, that the hotel is named after it. People say, �Let�s go to that Copper Chimney hotel�.� The restaurant serves Indian, Chinese and Continental food, one of the few places in vegetarian Surat to do so, and it attracts the corporate clientele from the nearby business district for lunch and families for dinner. Plus, of course, it is the breakfast, lunch and dining room for the hotel�s inhouse guests.

Surat has no season for the hotel industry as such. �We do business throughout the year except for ten days after Diwali. The city shuts down and everybody travels then,� says Kumar. But December in particular is a busy time for the Lords Park Inn. The Gujju NRIs of Europe, taking advantage of the holiday season there, come home. Surat has a lot of NRIs. They come to do their shopping of ethnic goods, clothes, food stuffs like farsans and pickles, which they take back there and use or sell. So the hotel does lot of business with them. In January, all the expats employed with oil and IT companies in Surat, who had gone home for the Christmas vacation, return and take up residence again in the city. �Then January-February is an auspicious time for marriages. There are lot of room bookings, between 30 to 50 banquets in this period, and we are kept pretty busy,� Kumar says.

He describes the positive aspects of a city that in 1994, saw one of the worst plagues to hit anywhere in India. �Surat is a very balanced city, the textile industry is bifurcated into dyeing, trading, processing, finance, chemicals, machinery, electricals and motors, and there is the diamond industry, major oil and gas fields in Surat (Hajira) with about 200 wells pumping gas and which have attracted the leading companies of the world, the city is clean, safe, there are no water and power problem, and Surat is growing.�

The Lords Park Inn is Surat�s No. 2 hotel. The No. 1 is Holiday Inn, which is 20 years old, but which does not have the advantages of the No. 2 hotel... a place in the heart of the city that is close to the business district, the diamond and textiles industry, and the railway station. �We offer VFM, this is a no-frills hotel, bookings can be made from all over India, and F&B is our strong point,� says affable General Manager Anil Kumar who is a trained chef specialising in Continental food and who has worked abroad in a two-star Michelin restaurant�s kitchen. �Now I don�t cook,� he admits. �I last cooked 12 years ago, but I occasionally go into the Copper Chimney�s kitchen.�