About The
At The Bar & Café Group we have been passionate about creating a family-friendly atmosphere, coupled with freshly prepared food, ever since our first café bar opened in Duquesa in 2004. Our aim is to bring food, friends and family together, with grills, salads, breakfasts, chicken, special kids dishes or just coffees and drinks and our famous Happy Hours.
Today, we serve thousands of meals and drinks to our guests each year, and have expanded to 8 great locations along Spain's Costa del Sol. Along with free wifi at our venues we continue to serve food that’s fresh, fun and full of flavour.
Meet Zac...The Man Behind The
With five restaurants and dozens of staff to look after Zac Hauswirth still has time to serve, sometimes, hundreds of clients in a day.....and always with a smile.
The man behind The Bar & Café Group, that set up in 2004, insists that it is this friendly, open demeanour that has been the key to his success.
"I'm a customer service fanatic and everything must be perfect for the clients," he explains over lunch at his flagship The Café American Bistro, in Duquesa Port. "I hope I lead by example."
Having set up 10 restaurants since launching the company in Spain with this wife Anita in 2004, Zac knows the staff are the key to his business.
"I can tell in five minutes if someone will be a good barman or waitress," he explains. "It doesn't matter if they know nothing, I can train them up. Above all, they must be friendly."
The talented businessman currently employs 55 staff and this number normally rises to over 80 in the summer.
The Bar & Café Group is one of Manilva's biggest businesses and he is certainly not standing still, with Zac looking to open a new cocktail bar, in Duquesa soon..
"I often do 14 hours a day for 6 days of the week," explains Zac, "I have two great managers under me, but I still love working."
He honed his trade in the London restaurant scene, where he became a regional manager of The Restaurant Group (Chiquito, Garfunkel's, Frankie & Benny's) covering over a dozen restaurants.
But Zac was certainly not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Raised in a small apartment in Casablanca with six brothers and sisters, he studied hard and eventually made it to university in Cape Town, where he studied Economics. From there he moved to London, where he met his Austrian wife Anita, who is a major influence on the kitchen and undertakes each restaurant's interior design.
Together for close to 20 years, they fell in love in Spain on frequent visits to see friends in Marbella. But their business empire was to begin in Manilva and, in particular, Duquesa Port, where they opened their first restaurant, The Mexican Grill & Bar, in 2004. This was followed by a Moroccan restaurant (now El Gaucho's, The Ocean Café & Bar, American Bistro, which can now also be found in Sabinillas too,
