A Bangkok luxury hotel treated its top clientele to a tour of a destitute Thai village yesterday before dazzling them with a lavish feast, ignoring outrage over the event that prompted a boycott by elite chefs around the world.
Critics have characterized the event as a tasteless publicity stunt and a poverty tour for the rich.
But the controversy appears to have delighted organizers, who say the attention has cast a wider spotlight on what they call a novel approach to helping the needy.
PHOTO: AP
The posh lebua hotel has grabbed headlines in the past with similar campaigns. Last year, it hosted a dinner billed as the meal of a lifetime for US$25,000 a head. Six top chefs were flown in from Europe to cook the 10-course meal, each plate paired with a rare vintage wine.
Yesterday’s menu boasted another 10-course spread, this time for free. The catch was that the guests — 50 bankers and corporate executives from the US, Europe and Asia -- were required to spend the afternoon seeing how the other half lives.
“We wanted to open people’s eyes to a part of the world that needs help,” said Deepak Ohri, the hotel’s chief executive, who puts the hotel’s cost for the dinner and trip at US$300,000. “Who better to give poor people what they need than rich businessmen?”
Bright and early yesterday, the hotel jetted the well-heeled group to one of the poorest parts of Thailand. Their destination was Ban Tatit village, a ramshackle community of wooden shacks in the northeast that once raised hundreds of elephants but is now home to only five of the giant gray beasts, according to a brochure prepared by the hotel.
Dress code for the trip to the countryside was “casual,’” according to a formal invitation that requested a change of attire for the evening’s black-tie dinner.
After four hours of mingling with the villagers, the travelers were to return to Bangkok.
Champagne and oysters were among the decadent treats awaiting them, according to the menu.
Organizers hope that the visit to see the dwindling elephant numbers and the plight of the village’s 600 residents will inspire their wealthy customers to act charitably.
All the advance buzz about the event — none of which was good — hasn’t hurt, Ohri said, noting that nearly US$50,000 in donations were pledged in recent days. Contributions will be managed by a foundation the hotel is creating with its own donation of 3 million baht (US$96,000) to bring clean drinking water and other basic infrastructure to the village, he said.
Highlights of the 10-course meal included a seafood risotto, scallops with truffles, roasted rack of lamb, neck of Iberico pig — each to be washed down with a different fine Burgundy or Bordeaux.
“Gross!” was the reaction of the English-language Nation newspaper, which wrote in an editorial that the dinner cast a “disturbing spotlight on the disparity between the rich and the poor.”
A similar outcry in the French media prompted three of France’s top chefs to bow out of the feast last month after initially agreeing to cook it.
“You can’t see people living in misery and then go back to Bangkok to eat foie gras and truffles,” said Paris chef Alain Soliveres, one of the three who backed out.
The bad publicity spooked 20 other top-ranked chefs in France, Germany and Japan, who told the hotel they feared being associated with the event would harm their reputations, Ohri said.
Despite the boycott, four chefs from top-rated restaurants in Europe agreed to cook the meal.
Three of them will walk away with US$8,000 each for the night’s work: Christian Lohse from Fishers Fritz in Berlin, Henk Savelberg of the Restaurant Hotel Savelberg in The Netherlands and Atul Kochhar of London’s Benares.
Belgian chef Yves Mattagne, whose Sea Grill in Brussels has two coveted Michelin stars, told organizers he preferred to donate his earnings to the village of Ban Tatit.
“There are many people not as fortunate as us,” Mattagne said in a written reply to the hotel’s invitation. “These people rely on us for help.”
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