What Amla did not notice in the sale documents was that it was mandatory for all buildings coming up in the area to be four-storeyed — too big for a family home! He decided then to turn the building into a hotel (and to name it after the one he was running in Srinagar) and he hired the young architect Achyut Purushottam Kanvinde, who had just returned from Harvard and eventually became famous for being the creator of some of the city’s better-known addresses, to design the Art Deco building.

Broadway was the first hotel in the city to offer bed and breakfast (we take the latter for granted today!) for the then princely sum of Rs 15 a day.

A hotel with Broadway’s DNA had to have a restaurant that had an equally interesting story. Khattar, who had studied hotel management at Michigan State University, East Lansing (USA), had an original idea. An avid collector of discarded old household items, which he had filled up his home with (his mother jokingly called him a kabadiwallah), Khattar wanted his restaurant to grow around this treasure trove.

He turned to our resident cultural impresario, Rajeev Sethi, who happens to be a family friend, for advice. Sethi, who’s famous in the hospitality world for conceptualising the Spice Route at The Imperial, advised Khattar to launch a restaurant named "Chor Bazar" (Thieves’ Market), which is how he described the young man's collection of knickknacks, and also in deference to the capital’s oldest such marketplace, which comes alive every Sunday not far from Hotel Broadway.

The idea appealed to Khattar. He tweaked the name to Chor Bizarre — his collection was indeed "bizarre" — and decided to open a restaurant dedicated to Indian cuisine, with a strong Kashmiri wazwan component to introduce Delhi’s butter chicken-overloaded palate to a different world of flavours to get excited about.

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