The 5 Chair Hotel

The 5 Chair Hotel

As I sit down to write about the 5 chair hotel, a lot of striking, closer-to-heart emotions rip through and the recollections take me back to the most precious years in school, just after my adolescence. The school is Regional Engineering College in the inconspicuous city of Trichy, a Southern Indian non-metro.

The campus is not lush green with buildings of architectural excellence. In contrast, the campus is a dry, barren land with buildings of modest outlook and sufficient facilities for the activities of a highly technical educational institution.

There were a couple of cafeterias, a shopping complex with a juice centre and a few more shops where anyone can get a quick bite. Though these joints are still in my faint account, the 5 Chair Hotel comes across strongly as a treasure to cherish.

Everything revolved around the 5 Chair Hotel for most of us in RECT. The Restaurant was, and most probably still is, in the Trichy-Tanjore main road. A stone’s throw from the main gate, the 5CH was strategically located to attract the hungry youth in the hour of need – typically around and after midnight. The business hours are between 10:00 p.m. and 03:00 a.m. The menu includes delicacies with eggs, chicken and roti, among the other chef’s specials.

The ambience boasts unconditional air with open space as dining area and a small roof made of dead plants. The seating capacity is for five - equipped with wooden chairs, some with lay back comfort. The restaurant does not have an official name (other than unofficial SamFox). The tax authorities did not require one – the owner used to tell us. It is the number of chairs that influenced the identity process and later would become as a legendary name for the restaurant – the 5 Chair Hotel. The owner loved it for the sheer rhyme to that of a five star hotel.

The recipes for most of the bill of fare are kept secret. However, the food preparation is done right in front of the hungry youth for dosa, omelette, bull’s eye and muttai parotta. More like the style practised in Japanese restaurants minus the usual gimmicks with knives and sticks. And certainly, the master chef does not throw pieces of muttai parotta in the general direction of student guests.

The making of muttai parotta is an art that involves the skills that of a mathematician, sculptor, architect and a musician. The batter is divided into small globes and every globe would eventually become a parotta. I would fail miserably to describe the process which turns the battered globes – made of flour and water – into parottas. Let me just say the globes are stretched into thin layer as outlying as the shape could hold. The single layer is folded into multiple layers in a spherical shape and then fried with oil until golden brown. I strongly recommend the reader to visit 5CH to see and listen to the music that is orchestrated when the eggs and parotta are mixed together into small pieces using a metal ladle atop greased tava. My feeble attempt can best describe the music as ‘Tangtanang Tanangtanang Tangtanang Tanangtanang’.

Everything revolved around the 5 Chair Hotel, I told. The mid-night tennis ball cricket games, last minute preparations for the examinations (bi-weekly, internal and the semester exams), the late night walks for better health, the late night walks to spoil health (the 5CH boasts a varied collections of cigarettes as part of the dessert menu), the expeditions to the local touring talkies, the rehabilitation counselling to the Devotees Of Perfect Eternity (the user group of narcotics – DOPE) and the bedtime story telling routine - judiciously practised as a round-robin, among the special interest groups.

Everything revolved around the 5CH. Everything was scheduled between 10:00 p.m. and 03:00 a.m. The favourite dialogue among the friends, along with the morning news, used to be about the Chef’s special they had at the 5CH the previous night. Due to the unconventional business hours, the 5CH invites only the male guests. The unwritten rule expects that the guests are engineers OR pursuing to be engineers. The owner frowns upon the trespassing drivers and probably charges them more to discourage using the academic facility.

The time was 1991-1994. After two decades and half, and after a few memberships with star hotel chains, I still openly yearn for a late night walk towards the 5CH in the dry, barren lands of my Alma mater – to savour the chef’s special of the night.