‘Every Miso Soup Was a Loss’: The Taj Turnaround Story You Had No Idea About
By mid-2019, Wasabi by Morimoto at Delhi’s Taj Mahal Hotel had been shut. It was one of the capital’s most celebrated Japanese restaurants, loved by diners and by the man who closed it: Puneet Chhatwal, Managing Director and CEO of Indian Hotels Company Limited.
The reason was brutally simple.
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“Every miso soup we would have sold would have created a loss,” Chhatwal tells Vir Sanghvi in Episode 9 of the Table 1 podcast.
IHCL had retained the Mansingh Road hotel on terms that required it to share 32.5% of revenue with NDMC after an 80% jump in the municipal share. Add capital reserves for renovation, property tax and insurance, Chhatwal explains, and any restaurant unable to generate an operating margin “north of 40” became unviable.
“We didn’t shut it because we love to shut Wasabi,” he says. “I mean, I love Wasabi. My family likes Wasabi. But we had to do it because it became unaffordable.”
That decision captures the philosophy behind one of Indian hospitality’s most striking turnarounds: respect the emotion, but never hide from the arithmetic.
When Chhatwal joined Taj in November 2017, IHCL had roughly 125 hotels in operation and about 15 in its pipeline. Today, he says, the portfolio has crossed 630 hotels, with 385 in operation and 255 under development, and roughly 32,000 rooms open plus another 32,000 in the pipeline.
The financial transformation is sharper still. IHCL’s market capitalisation was around ₹13,000 crore when he arrived; it later touched ₹1.2 lakh crore and is now close to ₹1 lakh crore. A company that had largely remained loss-making after the 26/11 attacks has now reported profit after tax “north of ₹2,000 crore”, on turnover that was around ₹4,000 crore when he joined.
The turnaround did not follow the standard hotel playbook. At Taj Mahal, New Delhi, IHCL reduced the number of rooms, converting three smaller rooms into two larger ones to create bigger bathrooms and a stronger luxury proposition.
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“We are maybe the first company in the world to go down from 284 rooms to 214 rooms,” Chhatwal says. “I don’t know of anyone else who’s actually reduced inventory… to actually make more money.”
The renovated hotel emerged with fewer keys, larger rooms, a repositioned Chambers and economics that could support its expensive rent and higher NDMC share.
Sanghvi puts the uncomfortable question directly: did Chhatwal inherit a magnificent brand damaged by years of poor decisions and failed attempts at revival?
Chhatwal refuses the saviour narrative. Taj, he says, is “not just a brand, it’s an emotion,” built over roughly 125 years rather than rescued by one turnaround specialist. His opportunity was to reimagine brands such as Vivanta, Gateway and Ginger for a changing India, while protecting what no spreadsheet could recreate.
His final measure of the job is larger than market capitalisation, margins or hotel count.
“When you serve the Taj, you serve the nation.”
