Siloé, a chef's dream....

Meet David Catherin, the 25 year-old business owner of the warm, intimate and homely café known as “Siloé Café Bistro”.

David grew up in Burundi, with a Rwandan mother and a Belgian father. “Growing up in Burundi was a world full of charm, great ambiance especially in the city of Bujumbura” he says. He describes the people of Burundi as simple, carefree and welcoming. Perhaps, this project is a tribute to the city that bred him.

His passion for the kitchen started from his early childhood, as he was always drawn to the art of cooking. In particular, he had a soft heart for pastries. I mean who could blame him, they are savoury and sweet and if I am not mistaken, we all have our favourite pastry as it reminds us all, the little child in us. To say the least, his parents had an influence on his path, “My father was a chef and my mother was a great cook as well because she worked in hotels”. I guess his lucky charm was to grow up in the culinary world while eating good food and enjoying a variety of dishes.

One of his first challenge and lesson was that he noticed that the Rwandan food culture is not prevalent in the daily routines of people. For example, eating food on the go is seen as lack of good manners. When he first moved to Rwanda, where he worked in an ice-cream shop, he had to convince his crowd of adults that they could have ice cream just as much as the children.

When asked about the name of his Café Siloé, he replied by “The name originates from the Bible, where Jesus cured a blind man with water from the lake of Siloé”. So, if you must know Siloé might be the sanctuary for your cure.

The calm and soft-spoken entrepreneur, currently a boss to young staff says that as a boss “I am patient, cool and I try my best to be a good listener …I train my staff regularly in case I am absent I want them to be able to manage”.

Other challenges that most bosses meet are managing time, whether for their business or for personal reasons. David says the secret is simple “You need to have a good set-up and be good at managing your time”. Nonetheless, the young boss easily spends his whole day in either the kitchen or conversing with customers. He loves working hard and making himself busy.

To attract his customers, he mentioned that the basic is marketing through social media, caring for your customers and being unique. He added, “When a product does not work, I remove it and I always try to change things around”.

Like many, the pandemic had an effect on his business as he had just opened two days before lockdown. Despite, the setback David went with the times and started using home-delivery services and to his surprise many people enjoy eating his food at home.

During our conversation, David wanted to share the following tips with our audience “Take risks, be courageous and do business for something you have a passion for, work hard even if it means there are no days off, reinvest in your business and don’t have high expectations to make big profit immediately”. The beginning will always be hard, it will need you to be very patient and demand you to be faithful, so lots of prayers my people.

David is working on new dishes and wants to refine the menu with the special touch, that of Siloé and he says to wait in for a big surprise.

The experience of being a business owner has changed him, “I became more responsible, I am constantly growing and sometimes it is hard to be very crude with people,” he says. His dream of being a chef has become a reality and now his biggest dream is to see a chain of Siloé café Bistro outside Kigali.

“Why should we come to Siloé?” I asked. He replied, “When I remember how my mum used to take care of her guests at home and seeing people enjoy the food she had cooked, it makes me extremely happy to see that I am somehow playing her role and if you want to eat like a food connoisseur then Siloé is the right place for you”. His vision was to bring homemade small dishes with a rather fashionable New York café feel and we are all testifying to the metamorphosis of his vision.