Sid & Chand Sahrawat Have High Hopes For Their New Restaurant, Anise

Restaurateurs Sid and Chand Sahrawat have been to hell and back but now they’re rising from the floodwaters with new restaurant Anise.

Sid Sahrawat recently overcame one of his biggest fears.

“It’s taken me 18 years to get him on a roller coaster,” says Chand Sahrawat of her chef husband, who finally succumbed to family pressure during a summer holiday on the Gold Coast.

“I like to be in control,” Sid explains.

“He’s the same on a plane when there’s turbulence,” adds Chand, “whereas I figure, if we’re going to die, at least we’ll be together!”

Like the unpredictable thrills they experienced at Sea World, the past four years have been quite a ride for the star culinary couple.

We’re sitting in the space that now houses the iconic restaurant they own, The French Café (reverting to its original name after six years as Sid at the French Café). Across the leafy courtyard, in the original 70-seater spot, is their new modern Asian restaurant, Anise.

The reconfigured “mini dining precinct”, complete with private dining wine cellar for 12, is the couple’s latest offering to the notoriously difficult landscape that is hospitality in the post-Covid era, one exacerbated by two catastrophic floods at their modern Indian Fort Lane restaurant, Cassia, in 2022 and 2023.

The subsequent reopening of Cassia at SkyCity has eased much of the pressure (the corporate giant now oversees their HR and marketing), and the launch of their new tandoor-inspired bar and restaurant Kol in Ponsonby last year provided Sid with an invigorating new creative project to focus on.

“I think I have PTSD from hospo,” she says. “Once Cassia was [relocated to Federal Street], I had no energy left. Sid found me one morning, watching Netflix and knitting. And he’s like, are you okay? I said no, I just need my hands to be busy, this is me doing therapy, figuring out what I want to do with life.”

She has since moved on to a full-time role with the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation, and Sid has experienced his own reckoning of sorts.

“Now I don’t take anything for granted,” he says. “And I’ve relaxed a lot more. Before I was too much of a control freak. With Cassia coming into the equation that was a time to say, okay, now I can’t do everything. I have to let go of a lot of things. And that was actually really good. Because then you can grow yourself and your business and the people who work in the business.”

The founder of Ponsonby fine-dining exemplar Sidart (now owned by Lesley Chandra) is no less exacting about the food, however. Today he’s sampling the spicy buttermilk masala fried chicken sliders from Anise’s snack menu, and is on a mission to create “the softest buns ever” before the restaurant opens officially on February 2. (Don’t ask how much butter and cream goes into each one.)

Anise is affectionately named after the first place Sid worked in Wellington, an “amazing” Thai restaurant in the Cuba Street building now occupied by Floriditas (and yes, he did ask permission). Like the pan-Asian cuisine he cut his teeth cooking at the Grand Hyatt Muscat in Oman, it’s a platform for Sid to flex his creative culinary muscles, working with Kiwi head chef Tommy Hope (formerly Attica, Melbourne) with an a la carte menu showcasing the “robust” flavours of Thailand, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Korea and China.

If Anise was a real baby, he says, its personality would be somewhere between the flamboyance and fun of Cassia and the elegance of The French Café. The same team will work across both Symonds Street restaurants.

“They can’t do too casual,” says Chand, laughing.

“You can’t go too rustic in one and then be using tweezers in the other one,” adds Sid. “So we will have a nice balance.”

He hopes the new menu will conjure nostalgia for seasoned travellers to Asia. There’s Chand’s favourite, Singaporean-style Hainanese chicken cooked in roasted chicken stock and coriander root; black pepper crab croustade with dashi and egg yolk sauce; and the piece de resistance: pork belly, rolled over two days, cooked in master-stock overnight then caramelised, and served with savoy cabbage, pickled ginger and green apple.

Anise maintains The French Café's elegant interior, with the addition of a few vibrant pops of colour, from the navy banquettes to the pink Japanese blossoms decal, copper-tinted pendant lights and large-scale floral Emma Bass prints throughout.

What, then, will become of the Auckland institution founded by Annie Mantell and Barrington Salter in the 80s, now that it will only be open from Thursday to Saturday in the dining room across the courtyard? In this age of sharing plates and casual eating, of steep interest rates and the rising cost of living, is fine dining still relevant in 2024?

Chand thinks so — after all, the globally recognised restaurants, those with hats and stars and glowing reviews in places that tourists read about, are generally fine dining. They’ve dined around the world at Michelin-starred restaurants that have felt very relaxed.

“But also the world has changed,” says Sid. “From my point of view, fine dining just doesn’t mean everyone getting their own plate of food with 10, 15 components. I think you can do a fine dining barbecue or fine-dining anything. It’s about the experience and what you’re eating.”

The smaller, more exclusive French Café offering will be a five-course tasting menu, with a courtyard barbecue served in the summer months, along with the continuation of their monthly Tuesday Test Kitchen (a six-course menu with snacks from The French Café, Kol and Cassia). Gone are the starched white tablecloths. The new space was the former private dining room and it still hosts weddings, with guests overlooking a picturesque leafy courtyard where the ‘I dos’ take place. Inside it has a high stud and wooden floors, and with its open-plan kitchen, feels more celebratory, the sort of space where you’d feel inclined to engage with the other diners in the room.

It’s not the first time the duo has tweaked the famously iconic recipe that has kept The French Café at the top of best-of lists for eons. When the Sahrawats took it over in 2018 they boldly renamed it Sid at the French Café.

Now though, as they scale it back, it will revert to its former name, a decision borne partly from the more lyrical sound of “Anise and the French Café”, and the fact Sid is not at the restaurant every night of the week. Growing the business has precipitated the need to cede some of that control.

Anyone who follows Sid on LinkedIn would have seen glimpses of the toll the past four years have taken on the couple. In one recent post, he wrote of the weight of responsibility of being a business owner, and the importance of leaning on your team to keep going.

“It’s lonely at the top,” says Chand. “During Covid, it never worried me about the fact that we weren’t making money, it worried me that if we couldn’t pay the 60 people [on the team]. That’s 60 families. And then when you sit there in the night with anxiety, like thinking about the suppliers and their families …

“Mortgages went up, including ours. We are all in the same mode. Revenue’s dropping dramatically, but your costs don’t change. There’s only a certain time you can keep sustaining that but you’ve got to keep smiling, you’ve got to keep positive for your team.”

Despite it all, Sid has kept his public profile buoyant, currying favour with his Instagram followers with video content suggested by their creative agency, The Attention Seeker, as a brand awareness exercise, where he pairs random food items with sauces from their Cassia At Home range in a series called Does it Curry? Some, like pavlova, strangely work, says the chef. Others, like the beer biryani combo, is up there with “the worst five things I’ve ever had in my life”.

“You need to have fun in life, especially with food,” he says.

That’s also why this year they will each host culinary tours to India, and now that Anise is up and running, Chand will be able to focus on her full-time position as a project manager at the Breast Cancer Foundation of NZ. It’s a role that has given her purpose in life, she says, particularly after losing her nana to breast cancer, and going through her own scare in 2018. (She’s currently working on converting a donated camper van from the BNZ, which was used for mobile banking during Covid, so nurses can use it.) For now, she’s effectively working two jobs, three if you count the fact Sid and Chand are parents to 12-year-old Zoya and 8-year-old Roan, but once Anise is up and running things will become less intensive.

“You’ve got to adapt to the circumstances you are in, otherwise you’ll just be negative and keep complaining,” she says. “Cost of living is happening everywhere and for everyone. So, we’ve got to make it more sustainable and accessible for everyone. Otherwise there won’t be a business and there won’t be jobs.”

“And I guess one thing we do quite well together is that we don’t sit back and wait and watch,” adds Sid. “We’re always trying to keep the ball rolling, maybe a bit too much sometimes. Personally, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

Anise opens February 2, and is now open for bookings. 210 Symonds Street, Eden Terrace, Auckland.

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