Tanaka Mutakwa

Pahari African Restaurant is nestled on the corner of Cecil Road and Swift Street in the multifaceted and culturally-diverse suburb of Salt River in Cape Town, South Africa. At this location, you will find our family restaurant which offers guests an authentic African cuisine dining experience. 

Some say you should never do business with your family. I did just that and it has been worthwhile. 

This is the story of how we started Pahari African Restaurant 5 years ago and how it has grown into the establishment it is today. Before we get into the story, let us roll back a few years. 

I moved to Cape Town 14 years ago to study computer science at the University of Cape Town. After completing my degree in 2010, I remained based in Cape Town and I have been working in the technology industry. 

As with most people far from home, I missed the home-cooked African cuisine that I grew up eating. I needed a solution to satisfy my cravings. I started going around Cape Town with friends looking for restaurants that would serve us authentic African food similar to what we used to eat at home.

We found some restaurants, but there were not many options at the time. I also identified some things that could be improved at each of the restaurants, such as the following:

• Food items were unavailable despite being listed on the menu.
• Some places had no menu at all.
• No online presence at all, making it difficult to confirm if a place existed or not.
• Service quality was below the expected standard.
• No delivery services on offer if I wanted to enjoy the food from home.
• Cash was the only method of payment. 

Despite these issues, I still visited these restaurants frequently as I missed African cuisine that much. 

I occasionally discussed the idea of starting an African restaurant with friends. As a frequent customer of the cuisine, I understood what service a good African restaurant should provide to satisfy its customers. I knew there was a gap in the market.

I had the idea but the logistics of making it happen were tricky. I had a full-time job in the technology industry and I had never been in the service industry or operated a restaurant. For a long time, it remained just an idea and I continued to visit other African cuisine restaurants to satisfy my craving for a food experience close to home.

In 2017, a series of events led to the opportunity to possibly turn the idea into reality. My parents decided to relocate to Cape Town, and they had some experience in the service industry through owning and running a bed and breakfast lodge for 17 years.

My parents could be on the ground and run the restaurant operation daily. I could continue working in the technology industry and support the restaurant in the back office administration. We had a few discussions and agreed the timing was right and we would try out starting our family restaurant. 

The source of capital was the next consideration, we wanted to keep it within the family so we spoke to a few family members about investing. In the end, the committed investors in the project were my parents, my aunt, my older sister, and myself.

We then defined some standards of the African restaurant we were trying to create that we believed would make it a success. We came up with the following list from the discussions we had.

• The restaurant will serve authentic African cuisine that has a home-cooked feel to it. Including all the delicacies that we grew up eating at home. 
• The restaurant will be a clean and presentable place. 
• The restaurant will be known for its great service quality. 
• The restaurant’s prices will be affordable to be inclusive and cater to everyone who wants to enjoy an African meal.
• The restaurant will have an online presence – a professional website and social media accounts to help with discoverability. 
• The restaurant’s menu items will always be available. 
• The restaurant will offer multiple payment options. 
• The restaurant will give customers delivery options so they can enjoy our food from home. 

With the blueprint of what we wanted to achieve in place, we started our search for a location that would become the home of our African restaurant. We viewed a couple of locations before we found the one that matched our requirements. We eventually found our ideal location through a commercial property agent. 

The location had been a fast food burger restaurant before and that business had closed down. It helped that it had already been set up as a restaurant before. We would only need to work on minor renovations and buying equipment. The first time we went to visit the place we knew it matched all our requirements and we took a leap of faith by signing the lease.

As a family, we came up with a few suggestions for the restaurant name and we voted on the final one. We decided to name the establishment Pahari African Restaurant. I believe my mom is the one who suggested that name, I had to go back 5 years in WhatsApp messages history to verify that.

My dad drew up a logo mockup on paper and I hired a designer online to digitise the logo. Pahari in the Shona language means “a place of pots“. In our African culture pots are made out of clay and are designed to create the best flavours on the natural fire. 

We recruited a small group of initial staff members and trained them in preparation for our launch.

On the 7th of July 2017, Pahari African Restaurant officially opened its doors to Cape Town. We received overwhelming support from friends on that opening day. I remember I went to the restaurant with the idea of sitting down and enjoying a meal with friends, but it was so busy I ended up helping with waitering for most of the day. 

Our friends remained the core customer base in the first few weeks. My younger brother and I had a large network of friends in Cape Town having lived here for a decade at that point. I’m forever grateful to those friends that supported us at the start as they got us going and spread the word. 

Over time our customer base grew outside of our friendship circle. A large number of the people who visit the restaurant now are people I do not know personally. We have a wide range of customers consisting of students, tourists, uber drivers, and doctors, the list is endless. The doctors from Groote Schuur Hospital which is located close by are amongst our most loyal customers, coming in almost every evening for a meal before their night shifts. We’ve also had a few high-profile guests visit and eat at the restaurant. 

Our various marketing initiatives such as social media marketing have served us well. Great word of mouth marketing from customers who have enjoyed a meal at Pahari African Restaurant has also played a big role in attracting more customers. 

The introduction of Pahari African Restaurant on delivery platforms in 2017 was a game changer. At the time not many African restaurants were on delivery platforms. This helped with convenience for customers who wanted African food at home and with discoverability of the restaurant by people who had not heard about us before. We are currently on the following delivery platforms – Uber Eats, Mr D Food, Bolt Food, and Africanize. With Africanize delivering the furthest, covering most of Cape Town. 

We have served 96164 plates since the day we opened. Our best-selling dish is Mpandawana (meaty beef bones mixed with green vegetables). In Zimbabwe, the same dish is popularly known as ‘Highfiridzi’. We named the dish Mpandawana at our restaurant in honour of one of my close friends (Mupandawana is his surname) who supported the restaurant a lot in its early days and still supports it to this day when he is in Cape Town. Mpandawana also happens to be the name of the rural village our family is originally from. It is poetic that the dish with these backstories has become a best-seller and the name Mpandawana has become commonplace in Cape Town to refer to the dish.

We have good ratings on Google reviews, delivery platforms, and Trip Advisor. We are constantly looking to improve our service and ratings. In the restaurant industry, it is important to always maintain a high standard and keep looking for opportunities to improve.

We were featured in RwandaAir and Mango airline’s inflight magazines as a recommended place to try out African cuisine in Cape Town. In 2019, Tinashe Nyamudoka, the head sommelier at Test Kitchen Cape Town at the time, mentioned Pahari African Restaurant as one of his favourite places to eat.

When COVID-19 struck, it was devastating across the restaurant industry. Especially during the South African hard lockdowns when restaurants were not allowed to operate at all. We felt the impact. Once things slowly started to re-open we survived because a large number of our clients are locals, so we did not have to wait for tourists to start travelling again. It was a tough time, but surviving that showed us how much resilience the business had. Many other restaurants had to unfortunately permanently close their doors during that time. 

We are always looking at how we can improve our offering at Pahari African Restaurant. At the end of 2020, we launched an AirBnb Experience, which is slightly different from our day-to-day restaurant offering. It is an authentic African cuisine cooking experience where guests learn how to cook a traditional African cuisine meal from start to finish. We also educate the guests on the history of African cuisine, its ingredients, and how the recipes have evolved and passed down the generations. 

Our AirBnb Experience is great for a group of foodies looking to do something social, as a family experience, as a company team-building activity, and for tourists. Several people have received a booking to our authentic African cuisine cooking experience as a gift from their friends or family.

If you are not an AirBnb user and would like to book that experience you can contact us at info@pahari.co.za

To set up for the AirBnb Experience we expanded our space and took over the neighbouring room to the initial restaurant which had been a hair salon before. We also use the space for larger groups who want to book and have a more private dining experience at the restaurant. 

Further expansion plans are often a topic of discussion when we meet for family dinners. We’ve spoken about opening another location in Cape Town, opening another branch in a different city, and exploring expanding as dark kitchens/virtual kitchens. At this point we have not committed to anything yet, we are focussing on continuing to deliver a great restaurant experience at the primary location. 

To this day Pahari African Restaurant remains a full family-run operation. 

My mom manages the kitchen and the chefs. Our menu consists of food she cooked for us for many years as we grew up. Meals she learned how to cook from her mom. The recipes have been passed down generations. She also does the business finances. 

My dad manages the operations and front of the restaurant, ensuring all customers are given great service by the staff. He often sits down and has many good conversations with the customers. I believe some people come to the restaurant just to have a chat with him. 

I run the back office administration – emails, marketing, social media accounts, setting up delivery systems, legal, and longer-term strategies. My fiancée who is now part of the family too has started helping me with the back office administration.

My older sister and my aunt also play a role in the operations by sourcing ingredients and getting them to Cape Town. 

If you have never visited Pahari African Restaurant, consider adding it to your itinerary next time you are in Cape Town. If you already reside in Cape Town we are just around the corner and looking forward to hosting you. 

Thank you to everyone who has supported us in our 5 years of operation. Thank you to all our staff members that have been part of the journey. We could not have done it without you all.

5 years from now I hope that I will be writing another article celebrating 10 years of serving you African cuisine. I’ve shared many meals with friends and family at Pahari African Restaurant and that has always been special.

Tonight we will gather for dinner at the restaurant as a family and celebrate how far we’ve come in this journey and look ahead at what more we can achieve in the next few years.

Where to find Pahari African Restaurant online:

Our website – https://pahari.co.za/ 

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/pahari_african_restaurant/ 

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/pahariafricanrestaurant/ 

Twitter – https://twitter.com/Pahari_African

Today is my 33rd birthday. As usual, I am excited about what the future has to offer.

I have tried to make it a tradition to write an article on my birthday. I unfortunately broke the tradition last year as I never got round to writing an article on the day. In the theme of not breaking the chain, today I would like to talk about building good habits.

As an avid runner, I am often asked by people how I’ve managed to successfully build a consistent running habit? That is a great question from a fitness perspective, however I think a more interesting question is – how does one build any good habit?

Today I would like to share 3 books that helped me understand the science behind building habits, what habits are, how to build good habits, and how to break bad habits. The lessons from these books have had a strong influence into how I structure my life and how I build consistency into anything I do.

I am not going to go into much detail about the books. The purpose of this post is to highlight that these books exist and are the ones I would highly recommend to anyone looking to have better control of their daily habits.

Atomic Habits by James Clear

This book reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviours that lead to remarkable results. The book is an easy read with many example stories that help make the concepts being taught easier to understand. It was the best selling book on Amazon last year which says a lot.

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

This book takes you to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. The book flows really well and uses research throughout to substantiate the concepts presented.

Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg

This book shows how you can have a happier, healthier life: by starting small. Change can be easy, once it starts, it grows. When it comes to change, tiny is mighty. As an example, start with two pushups a day, not a two-hour workout. In Tiny Habits, B.J. Fogg brings his experience coaching more than 40,000 people to help you lose weight, de-stress, sleep better, or achieve any goal of your choice. You just need Fogg’s behavior formula: make it easy, make it fit your life, and make it rewarding.

Final thoughts

Most things that you do are influenced by your habits. The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.

I hope this article inspires you to pick up one of these books and start your journey to taking control of your habits.

#NoDaysOff

Today is my 31st birthday. I have always found writing to be a great way to leave a snapshot of my thoughts at any point in time.

Given that a birthday is a great reflection point I have decided to write an article every year on my birthday. I hope to come back to these articles in the future and see what my thoughts were on each transition into a new age.

This year my birthday falls at a time the world is going through uncertain times. A time of the COVID-19 outbreak. The virus has spread to almost every country, infecting a large number of people. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has led to people losing their loved ones. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed.

As I write this article my residential country South Africa has just gone into a lockdown period for 21 days in order to slow down the spread of the virus.

Everyone has been affected. We are all uncertain about what our future will look like. In times like this it is hard to not view the world with a negative outlook.

About 6 years ago when I was 25 I read a book titled “The Obstacle Is The Way” written by Ryan Holiday. The book is based on some stoic principles. I have always turned to the lessons from that book when I’ve faced some challenges or in times of uncertainty.

In the book Ryan Holiday reframes a forgotten formula for success: “What stands in the way becomes the way.”

He shares countless stories of great men and women who succeeded in their lives because they lived by this formula. Holiday says, “Whatever we face, we have a choice: Will we be blocked by obstacles, or will we advance through and over them?”

The book is about mindsets that help us face adversity effectively. It teaches us how to master our emotions, how to build emotional resilience, develop persistence, and how to resist what’s so hard to resist. It helps us live in the present moment and to accept reality as it is, and yet not to resign but always try our very best.

Given the global pandemic we are facing as a world, I thought for my birthday article this year I would share some of the lessons I learnt from reading “The Obstacle Is The Way” as a reminder of how to face challenging times in our lives.

Overcoming obstacles is a discipline of three critical steps.

The discipline of perception

Perception is how we see and understand what occurs around us and what we decide those events will mean. Our perceptions can be a source of strength or of great weakness. If we are emotional, subjective and shortsighted, we only add to our troubles. To prevent becoming overwhelmed by the world around us, we must learn how to limit our passions and their control over our lives.

It takes skill and discipline to take control of bad perceptions, to separate reliable signals from deceptive ones, to filter out prejudice, expectation, and fear. But it’s worth it, for what’s left is truth. While others are excited or afraid, we will remain calm. We will see things simply and straightforwardly, as they truly are neither good nor bad. This will be an incredible advantage for us in the fight against obstacles.

The discipline of action

Action is commonplace, right action is not. As a discipline, it’s not any kind of action that will do, but directed action. Everything must be done in the service of the whole. Step by step, action by action, we can dismantle the obstacles in front of us. With persistence and flexibility, we can act in the best interest of our goals.

Action requires courage not flashiness, creative application and not brute force. Our movements and decisions define us. We must be sure to act with deliberation, boldness, and persistence. Those are the attributes of right and effective action. Nothing else, not thinking or evasion or aid from others. Action is the solution and the cure to our predicaments.

The discipline of will

Will is our internal power, which can never be affected by the outside world. It is our final trump card. If action is what we do when we still have some agency over our situation, the will is what we depend on when agency has all but disappeared.

Placed in some situation that seems unchangeable and undeniably negative, we can turn it into a learning experience, a humbling experience, a chance to provide comfort to others. That’s will power. But that needs to be cultivated.

We must prepare for adversity and turmoil and practice cheerfulness even in dark times. Too often people think that will is how bad we want something. In actuality, the will has a lot more to do with surrender than with strength. True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility; the other kind of will is weakness disguised by ambition. See which lasts longer under the hardest of obstacles.

You will come across obstacles in life – fair or unfair. And you will discover, time and time again, that what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure. You will learn that this reaction determines how successful we will be in overcoming – or possibly thriving because of – them.

I hope these lessons will be useful for you in these uncertain times. They have certainly been useful reminders for me as I wrote this article.

I am confident we will get past this challenge as a world. The world is facing one common enemy that does not discriminate against any criteria. We will get over this together. Everyone has their part to play.

See things for what they are. Do what we can. Endure and bear what we must.

Who knows, after all this is gone, humanity might come out with some important positive learnings on how we should work together and how the world should be structured. There is potential for a much better world after all this.

Stay safe. Stay at home. Check up on your family and friends frequently. Flatten the curve!

Along with Benny Ou and Ruberto Paulo, I am excited to share that we will be starting a tech leadership meetup in Cape Town.

The idea is to build a community of longtime, new, and aspiring technology leaders. Our mission is for the community to help each other learn through conversation and sharing of ideas.

We will host a monthly meetup in Cape Town on the last Thursday of every month.

The first event will be hosted at the Prodigy Finance offices on the 29th of August at 6pm.

I am excited to see what this meetup will grow into over time.

Leadership is a learnable skill, however learning about leadership in the technology industry is often left to chance. This often leads to frustration for both leaders and those being led.

Many technology leaders get the job by default. They are the best or most senior technologist and suddenly find themselves leading meetings, negotiating for resources, making strategic decisions, participating in hiring, and a whole range of other mission-critical activities that fall outside of the technical toolbox. The world of leading / managing talented technologists can be messy.

We have many leaders practicing different leadership / management approaches from various companies around us. We can all learn from each other by coming together and sharing our experiences.

We aim to create an open community of people managers and technology leaders to exchange regularly about managing teams, solving difficult organisational topics, discovering new ways of working with the people we are allowed to mentor and all other aspects.

Just like in the core of tech, managing people and teams is never “done” and there is always new things to learn, impulses to follow, old practices to discard or revive. This is the place to help each other and move forward, become more professional and grow for ourselves and for the people and organisations we lead.

The hypothesis being that sharing our experiences will grow us into better leaders which over the long term will make the technology industry a better place for everyone.

You can access our pages below for more details:

Website – http://techleadership.co.za/

Meetup page – https://www.meetup.com/Tech-Leadership-Meetup-Cape-Town/

I’m excited to announce that I will be taking on the VP of Engineering role at Names & Faces starting today.

Names & Faces aims to offer any growing company a simple and fast directory of employees built specifically for that purpose alone.

Names & Faces solves a problem experienced by everyone from the CEO to the intern. How do I get to know the people around me, get context for where they fit in & get in touch when I need to?

I’m joining an exciting startup with a team based in a number of cities across the world – Palo Alto, Cape Town and London.

Names & Faces was one of the startups selected to be part of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 batch of startups. I have followed and admired the Y Combinator program for a long time now, with companies such as AirBnb, Dropbox and Stripe having gone through the same program in their early stages.

About the VP of Engineering role

In my new role I will be expected to be a great manager and team builder.

My job will be to make everyone in the engineering organisation successful by influencing architectural decisions, establishing best practises, setting work cadences and cultural norms and overcoming the issues that get in the way of the team’s success.

I’m looking forward to helping engineers grow and develop their skills. Identifying potential in people, supporting them, seeing them grow and succeed is something I enjoy doing and I find it personally fulfilling.

I’m also looking forward to applying my experience from my working career to help Names & Faces succeed. At the same time I expect to learn and grow both personally and professionally. The constant pursuit of learning being something I value incredibly.

What will be different?

After spending 8.5 years building software in the finance industry (Allan Gray – 4 years and Prodigy Finance – 4.5 years). I’m finally going to be working in a different industry. I’ve learnt a lot of interesting things about the finance world in my career, however I am also glad to move on from some of the complexities that come with building software in the finance world.

At both companies I’ve worked for in the past I built software to support the main business operations of the company. Now I will be building software for clients (other companies) to use. This may seem like a subtle change but I’m sure it will give me a different outlook into how to decide what to build, how to release software and how to scale as the client base grows.

I will still write code, also operating as a software engineer in the team, which is something I enjoy doing and I believe every leader in the technology space should try hold on to as long as they can. My career has mostly been in the web development space and at Names & Faces I will be exposed to building and releasing software for mobile apps too. The technology stack is modern and will be exciting to learn, with all the niceties that come with React, React Native, GraphQL, Typescript and Node.js.

Finally Names & Faces is a remote-first company. Remote-first means working remote is the default. It means making sure your remote employees are as much a part of the team as those in the office. For most of my career I’ve worked in an office with my co-workers. I believe the future of work will be mostly remote for knowledge workers. So I’m looking forward to learning the different ways of working and flexibility working for a remote-first company will bring.

In case you can’t tell, I’m really delighted to be joining the startup world again. The Names & Faces team has already accomplished a lot so far, and I look forward to working with the team to do even more.

I’m still based in Cape Town and I continue to enjoy living in the city.

If you would like to know more about Names & Faces you can watch our demo video below.