FINE Wine & Champagne India - Winter 2018

Wes Anderson bagged several Oscars
for “The Grand Budapest Hotel” in 2015.
Even though he didn’t shoot the movie onlocation
and carried the disclaimer that his
movie was a purely fictional representation
with no connection to the city or hotel, the
similarities to the ‘muse’ (Corinthia Hotel
Budapest formerly known as the Grand Hotel
Royal) are uncanny – aspects of history, the
architecture and façade of the hotel and even
the requests managed by H. Gustave! It seems
that Wes’ stay and back-of-the-house tour of
his ‘muse’ in 2012 definitely played its part.
Built to celebrate the millennium during
the reign of King Franz Joseph, the Grand
Hotel Royal opened its doors to guests on
30th April 1896 and soon found favour with
the social elite to establish itself as one of the
most renowned and modern hotels of its time
in Europe – featuring en-suite bathrooms and
electricity-operated lifts.
The hotel had a glorious run till World
War II, in which it headquartered the Germans
and was partly damaged. Offices of various
departments of the Hungarian government
occupied what was left of the building till
the fifties, when someone in the government
realised the worth and a restoration program
was launched. But, in the turmoil during the
Hungarian revolution, it became another HQ
– this time for the Revolutionaries. The hotel
was re-opened (a pale shadow of its former
self) under the state-owned Hungar Hotels
on the 20th August 1961 only to shut down
in the nineties.
A new life was leased in 2003 by the
Corinthia Group founded in Malta in 1962 by
Alfred Pisani and his family with “not a lot of
money but unbending perseverance and the
vision to build a great hotel company”. Family
values, authenticity, fussing over individual
detail, passion and understanding, discrete
vs ostentatious define the Spirit of Corinthia.
The Pisanis embarked on a very ambitious
project to restore the past glory and original
splendour by retaining the best of the old,
while sensitively adding the new, respecting
the local architecture and cultural traditions
and eliminating the scars of the war-torn
decades. The doors of the newly christened
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