Restauranteur Ayaz Salim wants to take you back to the farm

Ayaz Salim’s mission is to educate people about real food. He owns a restaurant in Kochi, a South Indian city by the Arabian sea, but he is also setting up a farm in Munnar, Kerala, for young children to understand where their food comes from. He wants to start a homestay on the farm so people can observe as well as be involved in its running. 

“In Islam, the whole idea behind halal is consciously killing the animal with respect. And not importing it from Brazil or using a stun gun on it,” said Ayaz. Animals die to give us the meat we eat, he believes, and for us to value our food, it is important to be aware of that fact. Through his farm, he wants to show people how their food gets to their plates.

CULTURE SHOCK

Ayaz dreamt of running a shack by the sea and living out his days relaxing on the beach. So he quit his job in Dubai, moved to Kochi, and started a chic little patisserie and café called French Toast. Then reality hit.

The restaurant industry has a work culture that takes some getting used to, because, Ayaz explained, you are mostly working with raw talent. It’s especially true if you come from an industry where everyone has an MBA and lives in a large city where the common ethos is ambition. People who live in Kerala, where French Toast is located, are not there because of their ambitions but because it is where they were born and raised.

“Here, men can reach adulthood without washing a single plate or ever making their beds,” said Ayaz, confessing that he was one of those men before French Toast happened. He gradually realised that running a restaurant involved all sorts of challenges.

New hires had to be taught the basics, such as washing their hands before they handled food. The kitchen demanded immediacy, with no time to draw up a feasibility plan for each action. To top it all, the lifestyle is incredibly stressful and physically demanding. But five years in the business and two cafes later, Ayaz says he has fallen in love with it.

A TOAST TO FARMING

More than a restaurant experience, through French Toast, Ayaz is trying to offer his customers an alternative lifestyle. He believes that though food is central to the way people feel and perform, they hardly give its nutritive value any thought. When they eat out, they want their meals to be Instagram-worthy. “People aren’t aware and don’t really care about where the ingredients come from and how it got to their plates,” he said.

“After India opened up [in 1991 to foreign direct investment], the taste of food here in Kerala changed. Before that, everything we ate was organic, and plastic was not used. If you wanted jam, then you made your own,” he reminisced.

But now, everything is available on your supermarket shelf, so much so that you don’t have to give any thought to what goes into that jam, what the fruit looks like, which season they are found in abundance and so on. “Being a doctor or an engineer is still desirable, even though we have enough of those,” Ayaz observed. Not many people want to become farmers, despite their value to society, he added.

Ayaz says that French Toast has been a big personal journey for him and that his values have undergone a change. In India, he commented, things don’t function the way they are supposed to, “which makes you want to give up. But you don’t, and you figure out how to overcome your problems. People are so different, in their language, their education, and work ethic; infrastructure varies wildly across the country, and it is difficult to standardize.”

Being an entrepreneur has changed his character too, he said. “You can’t ever drop the ball, even when you are on vacation. Because the business does well if you put in the effort.”