Black Bear Brew

183, Jawahar Nagar, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir 190008

Mob: 0 96506 55793

Meal for two: Approximately R 700 + taxes

When Junaid Farooq studied in Delhi, he seemed to have spent half his time at Grammar Room, Mehrauli, sipping coffee and pretending – mostly unsuccessfully – to read his notes. In actual fact, he was mulling over an idea: bringing coffee to the Kashmir Valley. Within a couple of years after graduating, Farooq moved back to Srinagar and started a cosy café in Gulmarg. What took him aback completely was the response of the customers, who would cheerfully line up for hours, after trudging in the snow from their hotels, just to drink a hot chocolate or coffee.

While hot chocolate is still on offer, Farooq had another brainwave: start selling coffee seriously. Up until then, coffee meant Nescafé and, in any case, there was nun chai (salt tea) and cream tea in every Kashmiri family’s house, leaving little space for the black beverage. The first outlet of Black Bear to come up in Srinagar was part of a petrol pump in Barzulla, not far from the airport. The second one was in a shopping mall and the latest is in the centrally located residential area of Jawahar Nagar, with a near perfect mix of shops, cafés and residential bungalows.

What has worked well for this enterprising young man is a willingness to experiment with a beverage that had a low recall rate in the Valley, but which was known to be warming to the system, and so, eminently suitable for Kashmir. Also, bringing in Simonelli manual espresso machines (instead of the idiot-proof automatic machines) meant that baristas had to be trained to set the grind and to service the machines. Junaid Farooq is in the happy position of being plagiarised by a host of competitors, all of who have placed orders with Simonelli!