COFFEE – REACHING FOR THE SKY AT SALT ROCK
- O&A Team
- April 11, 2025
- Food, Life & Style
- Battle of the Beans, Battle of the Beans competition, coffee shops KZN, Darren Lewis, Sage Centre, Skyline Coffee Salt Rock
- 0 Comments
Out & About visited Skyline Salt Rock, one of the overall winners of the KZN Battle of he Beans competition
Skyline Coffee Salt Rock, located in the Sage Centre, serves great coffee, together with light meals, pastries and cakes. Like most pukka coffee spots, it is well hidden in a busy spot and exactly where most locals gravitate for everything from a quick catch up to a business meeting.
There are no waiters hovering with menus. Instead, you buy your brew from the heart of the operation where you might even find a barista chatting to a youngster peeking out from behind the counter. This is quality coffee served community style.
“When you go to the counter, you’re talking to a person who is like your best friend. My staff are very good and know our customers, their coffee and their snack likes. There are people who come here for coffee and their kids end up playing behind the till with our staff keeping an eye on them and helping them. Another important thing is that everyone knows each other. When you come here, you’ll probably find the same 50 people, all talking the same nonsense every morning,” says owner Darren Lewis.
Put it this way, if you’re considering a move to a seaside town with plenty of character, this might just tip the scales. Salt Rock itself has a unique vibe. Close enough to Ballito to be in touching distance of the urban rate race, it is nevertheless, quite literally, one of those ‘salt of the earth’ seaside towns.
At Skyline, the entrepreneurial spirit is also just as well brewed as the coffee. On the lookout for fresh veggies, Darren will tell you where to go because he supports local suppliers. “I suppose my biscuits are quite expensive. I could probably get them for half price, but I’m supporting a local lady down the road that spends hours making them. All my brownies come from a yoga instructor who loves baking. There’s quite a lor of few different, small things like that here,” he concedes.
Ten years ago, Skyline Coffee Roasters was launched in central Durban by a husband and wife team with a vision to roll out a franchise. The Salt Rock outlet opened its doors in 2021.
Last year, Ballito local Darren Lewis took over the shop and continues to pour innovation and passion into it.
Darren’s career started with studying marketing and psychology. Although he planned to complete his degree after relocating to the UK, exploring that new world and plenty of partying put paid to that.
Back on home soil in 2008, Darren took over from Devon, a friend who was running the Vida e KZN region at the time. He ran this for two years, ultimately helping roll out coffee solutions for Nando’s.
At around the same time, he says he got involved in a couple of motor sports events. A stop off for coffee during a ride every morning (usually in Umhlanga) provided plenty of networking opportunities and paved the way for him to begin hosting eventing and motor sports events.
He delved into motor shows, extreme sports events, drifting and big car shows for about seven or eight years. During that time, he was not only regional chairman for Motorsports Africa, but even helped grow the sport of drag racing, helping to set up a track in Port Shepstone.
But Covid and a family with three little girls who are now aged between seven and nine meant it was time to slow down and indulge his second passion – good food and coffee.
“I cook five or six nights a week. My kids’ lunch boxes are the very best. I love food and I’ve always loved coffee,” he admits.
Closely aligned with this is the fact that coffee shops are all about networking and getting to know people, exploring business opportunities – another fit for this charismatic coffee entrepreneur.
“I’ve got an older brother and a younger brother that are looking at buying into businesses. So it goes hand in hand. But when COVID hit, obviously the
store wasn’t open yet, and I, too, had been looking at different businesses. I went into selling property, joining a friend of mine in real estate for two years along the North Coast. I did really well, funnily enough.”
En route to his office, Darren continued to detour for his morning coffee – to the point where he decided that he wanted to buy a coffee shop and set it up so that people could network, chat and explore business opportunities there. His plan was to by a really good, functioning business and have someone on site running it.
Enter Skyline Coffee Roasters with a shop in Gordon Road in Durban and a plan to roll out at least 10 franchise stores. The Skyline Salt Rock franchise was one of the first franchises. Dylan and Jamie da Silva extended the Skyline roastery just behind the neighbouring Jazz Nursery.
CHANGE ON THE HORIZON
Two key changes followed in quick succession – the original Skyline Roastery franchise plan stalled and that business changed hands and then the owner of Skyline Salt Rock began focussing on another business opportunity and sold the coffee shop to Darren.
Because the business support structures, menus and recipes that are traditionally associated with royalties paid to a franchisor were not in place, Darren began investigating opting out of the franchise agreement so that he could put is own stamp on the business.
When a legal loophole provided an exit, he investigated rebranding the shop and removed the lettering spelling “line”, replacing it with – or in grammatical terms, a dash. The name remains reminiscent of the sweeping blue skies that meet you as you head down to the beautiful golden beach.
18 months into his coffee journey, Darren is now developing his brand with a number of interesting trends that go hand in hand with the positioning of coffee shops as community gathering centres. Local runners, bikers and padel players, for example, tend to gather at Skyline either during or after a ride or game. With this comes opportunities to provide branded clothing for specific sport lovers who congregate there. Already, he has built a bike rack for coffee loving pedal pushers.
“It makes you feel part of the community. My goal this year is to become an important part of the cycling community. On a Saturday morning, two different batches of 15 riders at a time arrive from around 6am. Our weekends are about mountain bikers and cyclists and runners,” Darren points out.
At the same time, he will stay true to Skyline’s roots as a top notch coffee venue rather than venture into the grey area of restaurants that do good coffee. For Darren and Skyline (or is it Sky-), the coffee and the people will always come first. That explains why he featured amongst the province’s top three coffee establishments in the 2024/5 Battle of the Beans.
