RIYAZ AMLANI The man behind Mocha, Smoke House Deli, SHRoom and Salt Water Café

RIYAZ AMLANI

The man behind Mocha, Smoke House Deli, SHRoom and Salt Water Café

Y OU KNOW the feeling. You’re at a friend’s party. The food’s lovely, the booze is flowing, the music divine, the mood chilled. And someone says, “If we could bottle this evening, we would make a fortune”. You nod, sigh, take another sip of beer and forget all about it.

Except Riyaz Amlani didn’t. It got him thinking that “there was no place where one could hang out with friends in the middle of the day other than Udipis and five-stars. So in December 2001, back when nobody knew what a café meant, he and a couple of friends started Mocha Coffees and Conversation in the outside area of a restaurant his father ran in Churchgate, Mumbai. Amlani, who had no experience in running any kind of restaurant (he’d been a shoe salesman and an entertainment consultant), didn’t have it easy. He had to deal with a lot of scepticism from restaurant people he consulted. “I was told, ‘Selling coffee will not pay the bills’,” he says. “But coming from a non-hospitality background helped. When you come to a business completely un-jaded, you are in a better position to do something different.”
The gang did indeed do it differently. They took a loan of R5 lakh and “got their hands dirty” setting up Mocha. “We faced so many hurdles,” Amlani recalls. “The manager quit on the opening day, and before that, we realised we had no money to buy furniture.”

 
Despite their problems, Mocha turned out to be a runaway success. It set the ball rolling for Amlani’s firm Impresario Entertainment and Hospitality, which now has 17 brands in 11 cities. “Right from the age of 15, I knew I wanted to be my own boss,” says Amlani, and he’s been happily living his dream. “We worked as hard as we needed to make it work, and finally, I think, a little luck is important too.”