Selvas Sea View Restaurant

Being on Beach Road in Pondicherry is interesting because the weather changes so fast. Selvas Sea View Restaurant is at Number 6, right near the Chief Secretariate. You can see the water from here, which is why we named the place what we did. It isn't a complicated name. We get a lot of people walking in from the beach, sometimes with sand still on their shoes. We don't mind. The salt air actually rusts our metal chairs faster than we’d like, so we are always painting or fixing something. It’s a small price to pay for the location. The kitchen is small but we manage to put out a lot of plates every day. We see locals who have lived in Pondy their whole lives and tourists who are just passing through for a weekend. It’s a weird mix of people sometimes. During the monsoon, the rain hits the windows so hard you can barely hear the customers, but we stay open anyway. We don't have a big marketing plan or anything like that. We just put the sign out and hope people like the smell of what’s cooking. Sometimes we run out of fish early if the catch wasn't great that morning. That’s just life by the sea. We do what we can with what we have each day. It’s a relaxed place, maybe a bit too relaxed sometimes, but that’s the Pondicherry way.