Rise & Grind with Nishant Walimbe
From the other side of midnight to 5.30am starts, Nishant Walimbe built a coffee bar, a padel habit, and a life organised around a different kind of energy.
For most of his adult life, Nishant Walimbe was awake when the rest of the city was not. That is the job, if you are a DJ of any seriousness: you inhabit the other side of the day. Clubs, sets, the particular electricity of a room at 2am, that was life, then. The best hours were the dark ones, energy building as the city quieted, sleep arriving long after sunrise.
He is not that person anymore, or not only. These days, Nishant is much more likely to be up at 5.30am, and he will tell you he loves it with such zeal that it is hard to believe it was ever any other way.
The years before Goa were restless ones. Thailand first, learning the art of craft cocktails and hospitality. Then Bali, where the intention was to stay and manage the coffee bar and gelateria at Cibo, Diego Martinelli’s Italian grandmother-style cucina and deli, a kind of place that ran on the philosophy of good ingredients, carefully-sourced, great quality, with keeping it clean and simple as the main focus. Something about that life, the pace of it, the attention to ingredients, the greenness of it, started to settle into him. Diego had a way of going back to basics, of letting good produce do most of the talking, and it stuck.
He returned to Mumbai just before the pandemic, ready to launch Grind Bar there with his co-founder, Prashasti. Then the pandemic hit, everything closed, Mumbai became unavailable, and they landed in Goa instead.
Goa, it turned out, had a lot in common with Bali. The light, the slowness, and above all, a sense that the day could be organised around pleasure rather than productivity. They liked it, so they stayed. And what they noticed, once they had settled, was one noteworthy gap: speciality coffee, the kind that takes its sourcing seriously and its atmosphere just as seriously, was not really a thing in Goa at the time. So they made it one.
Grind Bar is a small place with a very considered point of view. The design is good, the music is good, and the ingredients are non-negotiable. For instance, Nishant and Prashasti work with Eleftheria, who make some of the finest cheese in the country, and the menu is short enough that everything on it is basically the very best version of itself it can be. This kind of brevity requires more confidence than a long menu does, because nothing is hiding behind variety. The coffee is excellent. The toast and the scrambled eggs alone are worth the trip. Diego’s lesson, absorbed somewhere in Bali, runs through the whole thing.
The ethos of Grind Bar, high-quality ingredients, traceable sourcing, and clean consumption that does not announce itself as virtuous, turned out to map neatly onto the life Goa was building around Nishant. He did not set out to reinvent his days. The place just made certain things inevitable. The ocean was there, and the nature, and the rhythm of a city that does not really do late nights in the way Bombay does. The early mornings followed.
The 5.30am start is still, he admits, surprising to him sometimes. “The darkness thinning, birds beginning to wake, animals stretching, moving into the day,” he said. “It’s the other side of the night, experienced from the opposite direction. What used to be the end of the day is now its opening.” He is so joyous about it that you cannot help but smile.
Whether this is a personality change or simply a reorientation is not really the right question because Nishant doesn’t talk about it as a transformation; more a preference that calcified into a practice, and a practice that turned out to suit him in ways he hadn’t anticipated.
The other thing that has become part of practice is padel. He came to it the way many people do, through someone else’s enthusiasm, a game, a court, a community that was already there. But it’s stayed and grown, he said, because it does something unexpected: “It’s meditative?” It sounds counterintuitive for a sport played at speed, but it makes sense once you have watched a long rally. The concentration required empties the mind of everything else, which is, functionally, what meditation does.
In Goa, the padel community is something else entirely. “The finest in the country,” Nishant said, with some conviction. Games run to three hours, even in the deep heat of summer, because no one is in a rush to leave. The court becomes a place where the same people show up in the same heat for the same unreasonable length of time, and over time it grows into something beyond sport: friendships, rituals, a shared commitment to showing up. Which might be the best kind of community there is.
Plus, below, links to two summer smoothies that Nishant makes when he is not behind the bar or on the court. Both are the kind of recipes that look simple but taste like they took much more thought than they did, which is, again, the Grind Bar philosophy applied to a blender.
The Triple Berry Smoothie here and the Chocolate Peanut Butter Smoothie here.
1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com