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.
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.. "To throw away a piece of my mum's love and to throw away things that my dad worked hard for being ashamed of my identity.
"I needed to find a purpose," Christie-David says, "and I needed to build something that was meaningful."Food becomes a catalyst for change It seemed like "a wild idea", says Christie-David's brother, Aaron. "Shaun is a terrible cook," he says. Even his mother was dubious. "I would have never expected him to go into this business," Shiranie says. "But he was very, very keen on doing it."
Christie-David employed her even though he was fully staffed. "I said, 'If you could do all that before the age of 18, you can carry a tray of bloody food and drinks and take it out to people.'" Salim quickly became the restaurant supervisor before being promoted to head trainer of all the hospitality staff. Today she is studying a bachelor of social science.But in late March 2020, no-one could be sure what the future held.
Colombo Social was built as a socially conscious idea, says Christie-David, "but that evolution rapidly grew" into a movement. Christie-David tells of one woman, about his mother's age, who had been a chief economist at a leading bank in Ukraine. He asked her why she wanted to serve food. "She said, 'If not this, what? I've been here for a long time and not one job interview,'" Christie-David recalls.
"It hurt," Christie-David says. "And it got me angry. It got me angry because I didn't see a career pathway."I didn't think that I was allowed to be better because there was no-one that looked like me." "Shaun definitely sees the pain that new people in this country feel, especially refugees who have nowhere else to go," he says. "Shaun definitely is angry that he wasn't treated fairly as a kid growing up in Australia.
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