- How has your journey with Salt Water Café Journey been so far?
My journey with Salt Water Café is an extension of a former restaurant, Salt Water Grill at Chowpatty. When that shut, we envisioned building a restaurant that was more approachable. We then opened Salt Water Café and that’s how an exciting journey began. For SWC, we engaged in a lot of relooking at the best dishes from Salt Water Grill, ensuring accessibility at every step, and keeping the big Bandra element. What we did was, I sat with the architect and understood what his design inspiration was and then we even brought his vision to life on the menu. Initially, when Ayaz had designed, he had a lot of Japanese elements, there were also linear straight lines. The food we do will have a lot of Asian/Japanese-inspired dishes, either the soy or a miso, a style of stir fry, even though the menu is European, we will always have some Asian/ Japanese. We have taken simple dishes like Hummus and have added miso to them. Though we have kept the ingredients and methods the same, we are changing our own outlook on how we are cooking as a team. At the moment it’s Manoj and me and you will see a lot of dishes on the menu from the past few years, but there’ll always be a hint of evolution, which you can witness for yourself.
I want to stay authentic and hopefully, in the future, we move into a better space and a bigger kitchen, but I would still like to run it as one singular restaurant, true to its roots.
Chef Gresham Fernandes
2) Can you give us a brief about the brand and how it started?
We have tried opening Salt Water Café in other spaces, but I savour the idea of keeping it alive as an individual restaurant. I want to keep it simple. As said, we can’t have Britannia all over the country right, I believe at some point, the quality gets diluted. I want to stay authentic and hopefully, in the future, we move into a better space and a bigger kitchen, but I would still like to run it as one singular restaurant, true to its roots.
3) How have you innovated and revived the brand year on year?
The motto at Salt Water Café was always to keep it simple, we are not trying to prove anything to anyone, at the end of the day we just want to cook delicious food. No matter what dialogue you have, where the ingredients have come from, who has made it, etc., it all gets lost in the transition. We are a fast-paced restaurant and believe that giving guests such information is also heavy for them right before the meal – it deviates from the experience one can have. We keep it simple, we use good ingredients, we have good suppliers, and we support the communities of farmers, producers, and other chefs. The idea, as I said, is to keep it simple. The cuisine at Salt Water Café is simple, comforting, and complex, at the same time. At the end of the day at SWC, if you close your eyes and dig into your food, it should taste delicious. We do not sell food by the way it looks; we sell it by the way it tastes.
4) What is your nostalgia story and the celebration of classic, comfort food known over these years?
My nostalgia for Salt Water Café is that I have seen so many of my guests evolve over a period of time. I have seen guests coming in on day 1 and I still see them coming. They will travel the world and still come back to Salt Water Café. Some of the guests have now become friends, they keep messaging me that I miss the burgers, I miss the SWC food, etc. A lot of the menu is still getting developed at the SWC, it also has an influence on a lot of the guests who are regulars. There was this one time when a guest was in New York and mentioned that they had a nice burger, I really like it when people talk to me and have a conversation with me. These experiences are so that we can incorporate them into our food. There are days when people have not had a great meal, or when we’ve made something that the people may not have liked, but in your head, you worked so hard to make it right that you miss the point. These things are very humbling and in turn push you to build better menus, be it for cocktails, coffee, or even the bread program. It’s always about a give and take. I am not saying that Salt Water Café is the best at what it does, it is evolving and it will keep evolving, there is no final point where we are saying that we are the best at who we are and what we do, we are not! We are good at what we do, but there’s always that opportunity to get better. It’s also kids that started eating bread sticks and French fries that are now grown up and now have started coming to SWC for their first dates. We have seen people back in the days who were girlfriends and boyfriends, who are now married and have kids. It’s fun, it’s the community that we have built. The service is not too hard because the people who come, come to SWC at least twice a week or at least twice a month. So everybody knows everybody.
5) What will be the next potential step of Salt Water Café ?
In these last few years, we realized that when we started, we had a separate breakfast, lunch, and dinner menu. A lot of our clients started saying that we are travelling all the way from town, all the way from Andheri and farther away areas, and how they usually come for a particular dish, but it would be on a different menu. So over a period of time, we combined the menus and made it one menu so that all the favourites were easily available, throughout the day. So right now what you see is 60% of the original menu, it is more comforting than what it was before. Earlier, SWC was a fine diner/ café, but now it’s a hardcore café. We do use techniques that you get in high-end restaurants, but our food is still simple and comforting, and non-complicated. We have been evolving, it’s been 10 years now for SWC, and truthfully, any restaurant that has been for so long has to evolve, it’s also how the world works. Sustainability is becoming a bigger part now than it was 10-15 years ago. So, we are trying to incorporate all these things in the restaurant, we make sure we use less water and plastic. We are making sure that even the ingredients that we are using, we use mindfully. For eg: If the beetroot juice is made, the beetroot that is there in the juicer, we make sure, we either add that to salt or add that to a sauce, so every product is used completely. If pineapple is cut, we make a tepache out of it, so it’s used in cocktails. From watermelon dryings, we make a sweet and sour candy or make a pickle that goes as garnishing. We try and use most of the ingredients, but we also have space constraints here, I can take 30 ingredients and make pickles, ferments, and sauces out of it and fill 60 jars but I do not have the space to store everything, so we make sure we try and use the best ones.
6) What are your future plans for the restaurant?
My future plans for the restaurant are to keep it innovative, and make it much warmer with regard to textures on the table, the service, the cocktail bar, and the terrace. I want to keep evolving the space and make it so much cozier. My future plans are to buy lots of land and have lots of pets, travel along with lots of food, and consistently educate myself. Growth is what I seek from my near and far future!
