At 100, Srinagar bakery looks ahead

Azhar Qadri

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Tribune News Service

Srinagar, June 27

The Ahdoos — a milestone in Srinagar’s historic commercial nerve centre Lal Chowk — is a bakery that transitioned into a hotel and completed its centenary this year. It is now looking into future and planning expansion to country’s metropolises.

The hotel, which is also the city’s most famous restaurant and a recently refurbished and modernised bakery and café, overlooks the Jhelum and hosts and serves round the clock.

With its over 100 employees, the hotel has been one of the oldest entrepreneurial unit in the Kashmir valley which sustained the tests of time and celebrated its hundredth birthday this year.

“It is a great accomplishment,” 45-year-old Hayat Bhat, the third-generation owner of Ahdoos, said. “The best feeling is that we are being talked about even as we are 100 years old,” he said.

The journey of Ahdoos began as a bakery when Mohammad Sultan, its founder, was sent by ruler of Kashmir Maharaja Hari Singh to Calcutta to learn baking at a foreign bakery.

“On his return, he opened a bakery in 1918 and named it Ahdoos and Sons. After that, some years later when there was a birthday function in Maharaja’s family, a cake was flown from Delhi and another cake was made by us, and it was our cake which was liked by the royal family,” Bhat said. From being a bakery, the Ahdoos and Sons made an addition by introducing a restaurant in 1920s. “It was in 1960s that Ahdoos and Sons was shortened to Ahdoos,” he said.

On the centenary anniversary, the focus at Ahdoos was to rebrand and modernise its existing infrastructure, which they did by revamping the hotel and the bakery to which a café has also been added.

The 100-year-old Ahdoos is now planning to expand in the metropolises. Bhat, the owner and also the managing director of Ahdoos Group, said they were planning a franchise model of the bakery and introduce its restaurants in New Delhi and Mumbai.

The Ahdoos had come into a rare spotlight during Kashmir’s most turbulent phase when within a year of including hotel facilities, insurgency broke out. “This was the one of the few hotels which remained open throughout the turmoil,” Bhat said.

Over the last three decades, the hotel has served as a host to journalists from across the country and abroad.

It hosted the intelligentsia and storytellers and over the years became part of memoirs of journalists, spies and politicians.

The Ahdoos also has a dedicated clientele, some of whom visit every day. “We have always tried to gain and maintain the trust of our customers,” Bhat said. “The Ahdoos is everyone’s first choice. For decades, it has lived up to our expectations,” said a 42-year-old businessman.

Standing the test of time

With its over 100 employees, the hotel has been one of the oldest entrepreneurial unit in the Kashmir valley which sustained the tests of time and celebrated its hundredth birthday this year.