QUETTA: Fahad Ishaq and his brother Qadeer are busy arranging chairs and tables as guests arrive from completely different elements of Gwadar to take pleasure in a sip of tea and watch the sundown from their three-story boat cafe — the primary of its type within the southwestern Pakistani port.
Cafe Padizar, which opened in Could, takes its title from the seashore the place it’s docked, overlooking the excessive, rocky cliffs of the coast of Balochistan province and the Arabian Sea.
The boat, which belongs to Ishaq’s household, was left unused for years after its engines broke down.
In 2021, after graduating in enterprise administration, Ishaq determined to place his diploma to good use and started renovating the outdated vessel.
Collectively together with his brother, the 21-year-old invested Rs1.5 million ($7,200) to revive the boat again and, two years later, turned it right into a hangout spot — certainly one of only some within the impoverished, underdeveloped area.
“We determined to show the boat into a restaurant,” Ishaq advised Arab Information. “The interior elements of the boat had been utterly broken, and now there’s house for greater than 100 clients.”
The cafe serves tea, espresso and snacks, however the brothers plan to introduce extra meals gadgets to its menu and supply work to extra individuals.
“Proper now, we’ve employed six employees to serve clients,” Ishaq mentioned. “However we’ve plans to increase the cafe.”
Enterprise ventures are usually not all the time a sure success in Balochistan, a sparsely populated mountainous area bordering Afghanistan and Iran. Regardless of Gwadar being the middle of the China-Pakistan Financial Hall, it has been reaping few rewards from the multibillion-dollar infrastructure and power plan.
Cafe Padizar just isn’t the one enterprise Ishaq runs. His firm BOASIS Tourism makes a speciality of bringing guests from Karachi, Quetta and Islamabad to the sandy seashores of Balochistan.
“Tourism and touring have been my ardour since childhood,” he mentioned. “Cafe Padizar will assist in fostering tourism in Gwadar.”
The cafe, the primary of its type in Gwadar, has to date been profitable in attracting clients, one thing solely new in a metropolis the place the final cinema closed nearly 20 years in the past.
One buyer, Aurangzaib Abdul Rauf, mentioned that beforehand solely fishermen might benefit from the views now obtainable to anybody from the highest deck of the previous fishing boat.
“The cafe has been attracting vacationers from the closest cities,” he advised Arab Information. “Most of us come right here within the night to benefit from the sea lined by the mountains.”
