Manze with Nagesh Seethiah
Photograph: Alex Kelaart
Words by Rushani Epa
A pot of food slowly bubbles and simmers away on low heat, while the aromas of curry leaves, ginger, garlic and other spices fill his North Melbourne flat. Nagesh Seethiah stands in his kitchen as he batch cooks dal for strangers.
The chef would hop on his bike and head to Footscray Market which housed the fruits of his labour. Various vegetables and spices would make their way onto the front of his bike, and later transform into fragrant biryanis, dals and other vegetarian comfort foods.
This was the case for the last eight months. Week-on-week he would churn out 30 to 40 meals for friends or for those who simply wanted a free home-cooked meal.
Following a stint of cooking and travelling in Europe, he returned to Melbourne due to COVID-19 and this is when he decided to help others while he waited around.
“I wasn’t working and wasn’t sure of what was going to happen with work. There’s a good karma network on Facebook for our suburb in North Melbourne, and I sent out a message there to say ‘hey, I’m a chef by trade. I’m bored at home and want to make some food to share’. A lot of different people replied like visa holders who were out of work, international students, or people who were generally having a hard time. I tried sharing cheap and nourishing food that made me happy as a child.”
It all started with a spreadsheet of 15 people that he would feed during the first lockdown, and soon Jack Shaw reached out to join forces with him.
“Jack was also doing the same thing around the same time, and one weekend he asked me if I could give him a hand at our friend’s restaurant, Theodore’s. Lily and Henry who own it are the nicest people. Then we started cooking together on Saturday mornings. I think I might have hijacked his ideas a little, because I throw a bunch of spices in everything and put lentils and barley in all the soups, but he seemed to be pretty happy with it.”
The two would do regular call-outs via their Instagram stories requesting people to get in touch should they require a no-frills free meal. They would successfully feed 40 people for around $50 a week (mostly out of their own pockets), and would buy anything that was seasonal or cheap.
I tried sharing cheap and nourishing food that made me happy as a child.
Photograph: Alex Kelaart
“As JobKeeper and JobSeeker rolled out and places started opening again our audience shifted more towards people who were struggling mentally with the burden of all the extra things they had to or couldn’t do. And so our messaging switched. At first it was for people who were struggling financially, but then I didn’t want people to feel they needed a reason to ask,” he says.
Nearly 1,500 bags of soup and sauce later, the duo have decided to put the project on ice. Now Seethiah can focus his efforts on his pop-up venture Manze alongside his gig slinging pizzas and making pasta at casual Italian eatery Capitano.
Originally from Mauritius, Seethiah, his parents and sister migrated to New Zealand when he was eight years old.
“My parents originally had Canada on the list to migrate to but New Zealand got back to them quicker. We were one of the first Mauritian families to move to New Zealand in the ‘00s, and I think the last significant Mauritian migration was in the ‘80s. We didn’t know anyone which was pretty full-on, aside from another Mauritian couple and our migration agent.
“That heightened my parents' awareness for keeping us connected to our background, and they became unofficial migration agents for anyone who wanted to migrate to New Zealand from Mauritius. Our house became like a hotel for those to stay at for weeks or months before they settled down,” he says. Seethiah was exposed to his parents' ability to adapt to their new surroundings as his mother effortlessly kept the family in touch with their culture through her food.
Seethiah was exposed to his parents' ability to adapt to their new surroundings as his mother effortlessly kept the family in touch with their culture through her food.
“A couple of weeks after we’d moved to New Zealand we were staying in a motel eating a lot of McDonald’s for the first time. We ate it for every other meal because there weren’t many Indian restaurants. We didn’t even know what ‘Indian’ meant the first time we went to an Indian restaurant, having only ever eaten it at home and not knowing about all the different regional cuisines in India,” he says.
He recalls the time his father went to the supermarket one day and found fish heads in the pet food section. “Back then even livers went to the pet food section. Dad was really sheepish about the fish heads being in the pet food section, but it was a four dollar dinner. We had some curry powder we had brought with us from Mauritius too, and it was just the best dinner ever. I still remember that night really well and it was 20 years ago,” he says.
Mauritius was colonised by the Portuguese, Dutch, French and British, but it is one of the few countries that had no indigenous population prior to its colonisation. Many people were however brought over as slaves from Madagascar and East Africa.
Indo-Mauritians are the descendants of Indian immigrants who were brought over by the British in the 19th century as indentured labourers, and now they make up a large portion of the population. Other demographics include Mauritian Creoles (descendants of Afro-Malagasy slaves), Franco-Mauritians (Mauritians of French ancestry) and Sino-Mauritians (of Hakka Chinese descent).
Photograph: Alex Kelaart
Due to this there are many different culinary influences throughout the island. “There’s a big African creole influence, a French influence in the restaurant scene, Hakka Chinese is massive and it’s in Chinatown. The dumplings, noodles and other foods are outrageously good. There’s also a real Muslim Indian influence as well with dishes like biryani,” Seethiah says.
“My family think we’re from South India, like the Pondicherri area, and a lot of the food we eat in Mauritius looks similar to South Indian food. There’s a lot of mustard and pungent ingredients. In Mauritius there’s no Indochinese kind of thing. I didn’t see that until I moved to New Zealand and I was confused. I think in Mauritius everyone eats each other's food and leaves it at that. And we have national religious holidays for everyone. Everyone celebrates Eid, Diwali and Chinese New Year.”
Seethiah and his family mostly resided in the Western suburbs back in New Zealand which reminded him of the Western suburbs in Melbourne. “I was always surrounded by a very diverse group of friends. Then we moved out of the blue to the countryside and bought a hobby farm where we lived in very white societies for a while. I went through a phase of bacon sandwiches and pies for lunch because I was embarrassed at school, and I’d sell my lunch to other kids,” he says.
On the family’s hobby farm his mother would grow an abundance of vegetables, and they had animals which his father’s Muslim friends would carry out homekills on. “It was pretty full-on as a kid to watch, and we used to go fishing every other weekend too. We grew up understanding a lot about food and the financial realities of eating, and eating well,” he says.
Photograph: Alex Kelaart
Manze, Seethiah’s Mauritian pop-up concept, is Creole for ‘eat’, and is one-of-a-kind. With under a handful of Mauritian restaurants in Melbourne and a lack of knowledge on Mauritian cuisine, it’s a culture that Seethiah aims to champion in a contemporary way.
He brings flavourful foods to the table but also uses sustainable, seasonal ingredients. His dishes feature very little meat, and instead he opts to use goat meat or offal which he sources from specialty butcher Meatsmith and are less impactful on the environment. The chef also uses Australian seafood that is sustainably farmed or caught, like pippis, shellfish or octopus.
Seethiah’s friend Mike Li runs Superling in Carlton, acclaimed for their mapo tofu jaffle. “He’s Chinese-Mauritian and when we hang out we speak the same language but we look so different and people get so confused. We both know so much about each other’s style of cooking, where mine’s more Indian-leaning and his is more Hakka Chinese,” he says.
“That’s a really nice thing about being Mauritian in that we all look different but we all feel the same way about where we’re from. Chinese Mauritians love watching Bollywood because that’s popular media there, which is not to say the country doesn’t have issues with ethnic divisions, but what Australians can learn from Mauritians is about multiculturalism. It’s not like the ideal we have here. It can actually work and it needs a little more than buying curry in a jar and that being your multicultural deed for the week.”
He firmly believes in practising what you preach, and this extends to the hospitality industry. “This industry is really male-led and beyond that white. The sorts of restaurants that white chefs feel entitled to open are the ones that get all the accolades for being Australia’s top Asian restaurants. There are more independently-owned restaurants opening in Melbourne now by young BIPOC owners like Mabu Mabu, Warung Agus, Gai Wong, Superling and Shop Bao Ngoc. But I feel like we should be beyond the point where white chefs are credited with what they do with Asian food and that this voice should be focussed on and amplified by these young, independent BIPOC operators,” he says.
That’s a really nice thing about being Mauritian in that we all look different but we all feel the same way about where we’re from.
“In my own time in the restaurant world, staff of colour are usually in the back somewhere or washing dishes, and generally not working in the sort of restaurants I aspired to work in. It’s very uncommon to see them working in a mid-tier to fine dining level in a position above say, a commis chef or a kitchen hand, let alone on the floor in the dining room, being paid at the same rate or not being paid in cash,” he says. “I’d really like for BIPOC staff to be able to be themselves, have their own voice, and be able to feel part of a space. And that is the kind of restaurant/space/venue I want to own and run one day.”
For now, Seethiah continues to operate his pop-up Manze, and you can find details on his upcoming appearances here: @manze_melbourn