Vishal Kamat of Kamat Hotels on being the consistency king

₹702 crore, KHIL’s year-on-year revenue growth went from negative figures in FY20 and 2021 to ₹10.2 crore and ₹10.8 crore in the subsequent post-lockdown years. Their profits went from approximately ₹25 crore in 2020 to ₹312 crore in 2023. “We had our value really down before covid,” Vishal says, “now it’s come up.

My focus is more on my business than on the top price per se. It goes up, it goes down, it does what it does.”KHIL has opened properties in Rishikesh and Dehradun in Uttarakhand and Bhavnagar in Gujarat in March. Their intention is to get to the figure of 30 hotels soon.On days when he is not working, Vishal likes to laze but he is not lazy, he says, trying to explain the contradiction.

His home in Mumbai throbs with three dogs and a parrot, besides wife Aditi, who has her own restaurant Home Chef (her father Rahul Limaye founded the Gypsy restaurant, a Mumbai landmark in Dadar). So even on the rare occasion when he is sitting idle, he wants to be occupied. This does not include cooking, clarifies the catering college graduate.

He smiles when he says, “I avoid cooking. Yeah.”By his own admission, Vishal used to be a good cook while he was studying, replicating what he learnt in college at home. The demand for his cooking, naturally, rose from the extended family till he realised that he did not enjoy it anymore because he was having to do a lot of it.

So he one day made batata bhaji, a potato dish, so badly that he was not asked to cook again. “From that time on, I did not cook, though I do enjoy cooking,” he says, presenting another contradiction.“Recently, in Lonavala, I grilled some deadly chicken, which everybody loved. But when you cook yourself, you don’t tend to eat,” he says, grinning.