Shane Delia reveals his tough road to success
As his flagship restaurant mark its 15th anniversary, top Melbourne chef has opened up on his childhood and overcoming setbacks to become one of our greatest culinary kings.
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The P-plate driver looked terrified. He had just run up the back of a hotted-up Commodore – custom mufflers, tailfin – in Moonee Ponds. And the man who appeared from the smashed car – all tatts and muscle – was wearing a murderous scowl.
Chef Shane Delia had been filming a TV spot in the Yarra Valley. On a whim, he had driven his 2007 baby which he hadn’t taken out for 18 or so months.
It was a good day, an island of goodwill in a sea of challenge, most notably the collapse of Providoor, his ritzy restaurant home delivery service. Delia was excited about getting home, seeing the kids and wife Maha. To flop on the couch. Maybe watch a movie. He waited for a break in traffic to turn into his street.
BANG.
Delia was taken by surprise. He looked in the rear-view mirror. The P-plater was holding a vape, and a mobile phone, and fast turning white.
Delia’s first instinct was learned in the grimness of Melbourne’s west where he was bullied at school and found trouble for his impulsive ways. He knows the hot flow of blood from his nose, and has punched holes in the odd wall.
Self-control hasn’t always been his strength. And “f---”, as he puts it, he just loves his car.
The teenager was right to be scared. As Delia approached, “I wanted to put my fist through his face … to just go crank through his nose.”
Call it wisdom, or experience, but Delia softened in the face of the teenager’s naked fear. Or, as he explains, “I’ve just gone ‘f---, whatever’,” asked the driver some questions, then backed away, aware that adrenaline was still surging through him.
Delia’s car might be a write-off. But a week later, he tells the tale with fondness.
The firies turned up, to sympathise about his car, as did the police. Passing tradies lamented his loss, as did a man who stayed, just to make sure that everything was OK. And so a dark story of loss, verging on aggravated bodily harm, has been reheated as a fable in random kindness.
There’s a giddy pleasure as he tells it. Delia jiggles like an oversized boy trying to escape his 43-year-old body. He is hard to miss, starting with the imposing baldness. He talks fast, a kind of human motorbike with the throttle jammed open, which would also explain the 6am starts and absurdly long days.
He swears often, in a spill of thoughts and emotions which can be hard to plot, and leads to invariable contradictions if he stays on topic long enough.
He’s big on bagging himself, a winning charm. It seems he is always charged, whether it be with love, anger, passion, or an overflow of ideas, such as new restaurant ventures or the sorry post-pandemic state of hospitality in the CBD.
He thinks differently, as his wife says in wondering if she will ever fully understand him. Delia defies the boxes, yet he can tap any of them when the mood takes him. He blazes when he smiles, and when he glares, too, you suspect, as a magnet of charisma and, yes, sometimes shit, too. And don’t call him a “celebrity chef”, lest he balls his hands in faux menace.
The candle burns brightly in Delia, perhaps too brightly at times, which might also explain “the tonne of stupid shit” he has done.
Funky music plays as you watch the chefs in Maha Restaurant. It’s a slow Tuesday lunch day, and there’s an ordered unity, even laughter, as pots steam in the kitchen.
Maha, the brainchild of a 28-year-old kid who “didn’t have a clue”, this year marks its 15th anniversary. Customers return for the fresh delights of Delia’s creation, such as the spanner crab Tunisian brick “cigar”, so fragrant with spices that you find your bites getting smaller and smaller to make it last longer and longer.
Between you and the kitchen tableau sits Delia, explaining how he himself didn’t always act with the collegiate ease of his employees behind him.
He confesses to past sins, and confides in future hopes, in nodding to his unusual ethos of hard work and bounding ambition.
He is also here to explain the liquidation of Providoor, which saved Maha and other fine eateries from closure during the pandemic.
The business had $6.3m in debts, including $4.4m in gift vouchers which will not be honoured. That’s the equivalent of 22,000 gift vouchers at $200 each, and disgruntlement has compounded since the collapse was announced on April 28.
From afar, Providoor was his business. Delia founded it, He promoted it. He was the face.
Behind the scenes, the seemingly abrupt closure was not sudden.
Since November, Delia had been trying to save the business. He has personally lost money in the hit. He believed in the operation, and still does; Providoor does not fall into his self-ascribed catalogue of “stupid shit” decisions.
“Our financial backers didn’t give two shits about creditors and gift card holders,” he says. “They just wanted their money. It wasn’t a great position to be put in.”
Indeed. Upmarket restaurants may be about fine food, but their prospects are wedded to perceptions of goodwill.
“I do feel for our employees (there were 16) and I do feel for the people who hold gift cards because they don’t deserve it,” Delia says. “But I can’t bear that cross for the rest of my life either. It wasn’t my doing – if it was my doing I would own it.”
How does he feel about the end of Providoor? Relief is foremost. As his wife puts it, “I got my husband back”.
“I’m not happy about Providoor, but I’m happy that the stress is gone,” he says.
Call it a reset, if you like. Delia has had a few. And in a successful career, failures must figure. Delia has had “tonnes of them”. But they’re only failures if you don’t learn from them.
Delia was told by investors that he was out of his depth, that a “multi-venue marketplace international opportunity” differed from the opening and running of restaurants.
Many of those decisions contributed to the demise, he says. Instead, if he had just trusted his gut, Providoor would still exist.
Delia describes a tough childhood as a kind ofloneliness. The Maltese kid was overweight, didn’t play team sports, and lacked his own posse of mates. School was vexed. He couldn’t concentrate and wagged, often, to play pinnies.
Cooking, with family, was the main outlet. There wasn’t much money, but there was unflinching adherence to hard work.
Mum and dad, a production line worker, both trudged to work each day. Delia and his siblings were given jobs to do before their parents got home. Delia often cooked, following instructions on how to cook the chicken, peel the carrots and boil the beans.
Sundays beckoned as a weekly feast of food and festivity. Lunch was with his mother’s family in Preston, dinner with his father’s family in Sunshine.
By Year 7, Delia knew he wanted to be a chef. Asked why, he falls briefly silent. He recalls his grandfather picking fruit from the backyard trees. “People are drawn to things that make them happy, right?” he says.
“I wanted to cook because I connected it with being happy and safe.” Delia was working at 14, first in a servo then washing dishes in a pub. He planned to leave school, and it sounds like his teachers encouraged it.
At 16, there was a revelation. He went to Sunshine Hospital. He was given dexamphetamine and Ritalin for what was known as Attention Deficit Disorder.
“It was like a light switch,” he says. “Suddenly I wanted to come home and study. I was getting good results and everything started to turn around. I was no longer getting into trouble.”
In year 11, a teacher said he need not leave school. “I said, ‘no, I don’t have to leave school, but I want to leave school’.”
The sad payoff was that Delia lost access to medication because he was no longer a high school student. He was still a kid, thrown into an adult working environment in which alcohol, sex and drugs featured. Delia was a keen study. The regimented authoritarianism of the work kitchen, perhaps best illustrated by the ritualised humiliations of TV chef Gordon Ramsay, was a bubble he grasped.
“If you didn’t conform, you were out,” Delia says. “It was very hard in the kitchen – very testosterone-fuelled, very aggressive, could be abusive – but I actually thrived … You knew exactly what you had to do to get to the top … the unfortunate part is that you carry those traits with you.”
ADHD was a big factor, he argues, but not an excuse. There are many stories. In one, Delia was knocked out when his boss slammed the oven door in his face for plating three carrots instead of four, or the like. In another, Delia punched a hole in the wall (and threw a pot) when a hapless chef had not prepared enough risotto for 50 waiting guests downstairs.
“I thought you had to react like that to get people’s attention and respect and pull them into f —king line,” he says.
The macho stylings carried for many years, to Delia’s later shame. What he believed to be shows of strength were weaknesses, and he has learned that public executions for unsatisfactory deliveries, whether they be junior chefs or suppliers, only destroys the kind of trust and loyalty he values.
Sometimes, the man you see is not the man he is. Shane Delia appeared to be flying in 2016. He was someone. The ego was fed, in part because he was a regular TV face, albeit one who privately “shitted bricks” whenever a camera was pointed at him.
The restaurant’s growth was going well. Another SBS TV series of Spice Journey was to be shot in Turkey.
He drove a Mercedes, a big deal for someone who grew up watching his beloved footy team in the rain because the seats in the stands were too expensive.
He exchanged messages with close friends including public figures and Western Bulldog players, the kind of privileged people he still describes with an outsider’s wonder.
And yet he was desperately unhappy. He calls his manic dedication a “superpower”, yet he acknowledges that can play as a weakness, too. And the self-destruct button was being pushed, again and again.
He was overweight. And, as he puts it, he was letting down his wife and kids. Poor choices is his term. He was doing “stupid shit”.
The label serves to cover many of Delia’s crossroads moments. Take Maha restaurant, which opened in 2008 with money from his parents, in partnership with George Calombaris and others.
Delia has thought a lot about partnerships in recent years. With the restaurant Maha, the differences got to be too much. Many years later, he takes some blame for the falling out (and says he and Calombaris are once again “real solid”).
“I came in as a 28-year-old chef who had big aspirations,” he says. “But after a year or two years I was different. In a couple of years after that I was different again and so were they. Those differences can either galvanise you or they can tear you apart and I think that they tore us apart.
“I’ll look at relationships I’ve damaged along the path and they’re all the same. It all comes back to the same stupid shit that I would say or do, whether it’s attention seeking through lack of confidence or whatever.”
He describes a long journey in self-reflection, in reaching for a relative sense of stability and happiness.
He talks of one flawed approach until the age of 37, and another less faulty approach since.
The fiery temper was always there, and you suspect still is when invited to step up. He was lost in his surrounds. There was alcohol, and drugs, and an embrace that such everyday indulgences were the preserve of fabulous people.
Yet he says he wasn’t hooked on good time substances, certainly not in a physical sense. His problems lay far deeper.
Call it anxiety, or the ADHD, or depression. The labels probably don’t matter much. He felt that his career was about to “break”, that his family life was about to “break”. He felt out of control.
Partners, he jokes, should be for dancing or sleeping with. He and Maha, of Lebanese descent, had married young. Delia was away shooting TV cooking shows soon after daughter, Jayda, and later son Jude, were born.
The father and husband glimpsed a future without restaurants, or the family, in a vision of older life that terrified him. He’d seen the fatal blowouts; his own cooking mentor died at 54, homeless.
Delia describes a “cliff”. He was perched on the edge. He didn’t want to get up in the morning, or go home at night. He barely remembers the period. In photos from that time, he looks in his eyes and sees that he was both present and not there.
He speaks of a “few issues in my marriage”, of some “pretty poor judgment calls due to having a low self-esteem”.
So he set to getting his medication right. He lost weight. He shed toxic friendships – not bad people, he points out, but people bad for him. Most importantly, he asked for help.
Maha is thoughtful and well-spoken. She speaks of bad habits over a period of time, of a husband who puts himself under extreme pressure, most of it self-inflicted. Her husband “just wasn’t himself”.
“If she wasn’t the woman that she is she has every reason in her f —king world to leave me for dead several times over,” Delia says. “But she’s better than that and she’s better than me. She’s stuck by me and stuck by the family. I’ve also got a debt to repay. I can’t look her in the eyes and hurt her again. I’m not that person.”
Delia has found a happy place, despite the Providoor furore. The man of extremes is kicking life down the middle, if training at dawn each morning and subjecting himself to a crash diet in which his phone notifies him when he can indulge a small portion of meat or broccoli, double as measures of normality.
He still gets impulses to do “dumb shit”. Perhaps he always will. But he has surrounded himself with good people who offer free therapy when he asks.
Home life seems blissful. A playfulness between him and Maha can’t be faked. He’s quieter here, she claims, not “on” as he is everywhere else. She reads from her husband’s gospel about hard work and growth. “We wouldn’t be where we are now if it came easy, and none of it came easily,” she says.
Monday nights are dinner at his mum’s, where 30-odd relatives gather. “Be there or be dead” explains the obligation to attend.
He takes the kids to school, frets about their development, and tries to set a good example even if his swearing is just as profuse at home as elsewhere. Only this morning, walking the dog with Jude, father and son helped a woman change a tyre. He likes setting examples like that.
For now, he will concentrate on the restaurant businesses he has, rather than seek to conquer his domain one crazy, brave venture at a time.
He calls it “day one”. “I never ever thought that we would have what we have,” he says. “I don’t know where we’re going to go, that’s the truth, but I’m really looking forward to tomorrow.”
To celebrate Maha Restaurant’s 15th anniversary, a special celebration menu showcasing Delia’s favourite dishes over 15 years will be available from June 2 until the end of July. Only at Maha Restaurant, 21 Bond St, Melbourne. maharestaurant.com.au
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