Less than a year ago, Roya Rasuly was fleeing Afghanistan with her 2½-year-old son, husband and his family. The women’s rights specialist had gone into work in Kabul one day to retrieve her computer when she was forbidden from entering the office.
“When the Taliban came we lost everything,” she said. “They don’t allow women to go outside to study, [get] education and develop or be independent.”
But last week was a different story, as Rasuly stood front-of-house with a team of Afghan women to open a new restaurant in the middle of Sydney’s CBD. They include single mothers who have been in Sydney for several years, others who arrived after the fall of Kabul last August, and one woman who is six months’ pregnant and only arrived in Australia in June.
Afghan refugee Roya Rasuly is running a new restaurant, Kabul Social, with a team of Afghani women in one of Sydney’s busiest pedestrian thoroughfares near Wynyard.Credit: Steven Siewert
None have worked anywhere near a commercial kitchen, let alone served crowds of city workers during the chaos of a lunchtime rush hour.
But equipped with translated home recipes, hours of training and each other’s support, the eight women from Afghanistan are now running Afghan restaurant Kabul Social in one of the city’s busiest pedestrian thoroughfares near Wynyard.
“In Afghanistan and here, the environment and the work, even the language, is different. We all don’t have experience in this field,” Rasuly said.
“The staff have babies, or [they are] struggling, but we’re eager to work hard here. Day by day we become familiar with language, the environment ... We are motivated. When all the women get together and work, we have this power.”
Between them there is a chief of bread, restaurant manager, and kitchen and front-of-house staff. Rasuly has not worked in human resources before, but she will be channelling her expertise in gender equality and training women in Afghanistan to become the HR lead.
“When I started here I said I would come part-time, or three days a week. But when I saw the work and services, I’m very eager to come every day, working hard, making proud,” she said. “We are all eager to work full time – we want to work all day.”
The 34-year-old and her family arrived in Australia via Pakistan in December last year, unsure of what they would find on the other side of the world. After a few months in a hotel, they settled in Merrylands in western Sydney, and Rasuly fired off dozens of resumes.
One of them landed with Mahboba’s Promise, an Australian charity helping women and children in Afghanistan. They passed it on to entrepreneur Shaun Christie-David.
Christie-David runs the social enterprise restaurant Colombo Social in Enmore and founded its parent organisation, Plate it Forward, which is a food-based collective that donates meals and runs employment and training programs for people who would not usually have access to them.
He was organising food donations to Afghanistan after the Taliban came to power last year, and hearing about newly arrived Afghan refugees seeking employment, when he was offered a kitchen space in the Wynyard thoroughfare. “Both worlds came together,” he said.
Christie-David started scoping the potential for Kabul Social about six months ago and, after weeks of menu testing and hospitality training, it opened to the public last month following a three-week soft launch period. Already, word has spread across Sydney’s Afghan community and people are bringing their friends for a taste of home.
“This is creating a safe space for Afghan people that are coming here to say, ‘Yes, this is us, we’ve finally got a space in the city that is ours.’ And for them to be proud of,” Christie-David said.
He hopes the core group of eight women will stay with the restaurant for as long as they can, but plans to train one new staff member from the community each week. Women in the restaurant’s leadership positions will be paired with a female industry mentor, while every meal bought at the restaurant will be matched by a meal donation in Afghanistan. In its first week, Kabul Social donated more than1000 meals.
Rasuly said the women’s main goal was for their stream of customers to grow each month. “We are praying all day for customers, we are very ambitious,” she said.
But Christie-David said his core focus was the staff, several of whom have now referred their family members to come and work at Kabul Social, too.
“[One of the ladies] just gave me her phone one day. It was her daughter, and she goes: ‘Hi, my Mum loves this place, and she asks if I can come work here as well,’ ” he said.
“That’s how you know you’ve built something people want to come to. I asked the daughter: ‘How’s her Mum?’ She said: ‘She laughs at home now. She never used to. She comes home happier and so excited and talks to us – because she’s had a good day.’ Her background was pretty difficult, so to have her happy and know your staff are enriched ... that’s what we consider good business.”
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