VIDEO: Off Menu | Shaun Christie-David – By Patrick Ranasinghe
image Source:-abc.net.au
VIDEO: Off Menu | Shaun Christie-David He can’t cook, he’s not after money but Shaun Christie-David’s building a restaurant empire that’s changing lives one dish at a time. Shaun was always ashamed of what was in his lunchbox. Now it’s at the heart of his radical restaurant empire. Shaun Christie-David is a radical restaurateur who’s employing the “unemployable” and giving away thousands of free meals.
Shaun Christie-David can still picture the bin where he used to ditch his dhal sandwiches, the furtive act of a teenage boy of migrant parents desperate to fit in. SHe loved dhal at home. The aromatic combination of lentils, tempered mustard seeds, spices and fried onions made by his Sri Lankan-born mother, or amma, Shiranie, was his favourite meal.But at school, he’d be teased about his weird-looking, pungent lunch, buffeted by taunts of, “Shit man, your lunch stinks”. So, the sandwiches stayed in his schoolbag all day before being dumped in that bin next to the ticket machine at the train station in south-west Sydney where Shiranie was waiting to take him home.Today, that dhal, Amma’s Dhal, takes pride of place on the menu of Colombo Social, the first of Shaun Christie-David’s string of Sydney-based restaurants and social enterprises that celebrate multiculturalism and diversity, giving work and purpose to refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, older women, people with a disability and former prisoners. “I reflect on that sandwich and I still get sad,” Christie-David tells Australian Story. “To throw away a piece of my mum’s love and to throw away things that my dad worked hard for [because of] being ashamed of my identity.”
Graphic collage of a young Sri Lankan boy and a second photo showing three Sri Lankan boys and their mum and dad
Christie-David straddled two cultures growing up in south-west Sydney with Sri Lankan parents. Supplied/ Graphics: Nina Maile Gordon
The fact that Christie-David was born here didn’t calm his unease. He looked different from other Australian kids, his parents had accents, his food was odd — and his confusion about where he belonged was acute. “It’s not just me,” he says. “It’s all of us that grapple with being a first-generation migrant.
“Only later in life did I realise … you don’t have to renounce being Sri Lankan to be a proud Australian or vice versa. I’m powerful because I have both cultures; I can take the good from both cultures and build my own identity and really lean into that feeling. But that takes a while.” His quest for belonging was dark at times, peppered with anger, guilt and shame. He tried to find his place in the lucrative world of finance, but the casual racism in the industry made him angry and the money didn’t make him happy. He went to Sri Lanka but his privileged upbringing in Australia, free from war and full of opportunities, made him feel guilty. “I sat with that guilt for years,” he says. “It ate away at me. It got me angry. It made me feel uncomfortable all the time. It hurt.” He escaped to London “trying to figure out how to channel all these big emotions”. He came home and worked alongside some Indigenous organisations, creeping a little closer to the mission he sought.
