Trust your instincts and back yourself. Surround yourself with good people who support you. Give it a crack. What’s the worst that could happen? (It probably won’t.)
Darwin chef Minoli de Silva recounts the life lessons she learnt during 2021 and 2022 when she was a contestant on series 13 and 14 of Network 10’s MasterChef Australia.
“The experience is great training,” Minoli observes. “You learn to work with people you might not initially choose and it’s a surprisingly collaborative environment. But at the end of the day, it’s a competition and there has to be a winner. So you learn to deal with disappointment as well.”
Indeed it was in the inevitable ‘now what’ period after elimination that Minoli prepared lunch for a couple of Darwin friends and they decided to open a restaurant.
“I’d made a simple barramundi yellow curry,” she says. “My friends were raving about it, and of course someone said ‘you should open a restaurant’. My friend Seth Chin, who works in real estate, piped up that the laneway site of Magic Wok, which had been a Darwin landmark, was dormant. Then my other friend Shir Kelly, whose background is in construction, said he loved the idea. I know everyone tells you not to go into business with your friends, but that’s how Ella by Minoli was born. We opened in June 2022 and it turns out that the combination of our smarts works very well.”
Minoli was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Melbourne with her parents when she was just six years old. Having been raised on her mother’s very traditional Sri Lankan staples, Minoli found her curiosity piqued by the foods of her new home and eagerly embraced the Aussie dishes that turned up in her classmates’ lunchboxes. Oddly enough, hot dogs topped that list and even today she says she loves the much-maligned frankfurt, preferably stirfried with a sweet chilli sauce.
At her parents’ urging, Minoli studied chemical engineering at RMIT and later gained a job with the Department of Defence. In 2018, she moved to Darwin for work running an infrastructure project. “I knew very little about Darwin,” she says. “The one thing I was aware of was of Essendon Football Club’s relationship with the [NT Indigenous team] Tiwi Bombers. In fact I found I fitted in really well up here. I like the climate and the ready availability of tropical and Asian produce. I love the outdoor lifestyle and the watersports and camping on weekends. Darwin is too small to have cliques, and most people come from elsewhere, so everyone gets along.”
It was one of those newfound friends who urged Minoli, mid-COVID lockdowns, to audition for MasterChef.
“It was the eleventh hour,” she recalls. “My friend rang and said ‘I’m not hanging up until you’ve submitted an application’. I think I only got an audition because of lockdowns and everything was done on Zoom.”
As it turned out, the MasterChef kitchen was a “gift” that encouraged Minoli to find the approach to food that is so integral to the restaurant’s “cosmopolitan contemporary” Sri Lankan menu. “The flavours and the heart and soul of the restaurant are traditional, but there’s a twist,” she explains. “What I learnt from the show was instead of always following the rule book, find your own style.”
Which is how, during the first season, Minoli came to make the curry leaf infused sashimi dish that judge Andy Allen proclaimed his favourite dish of the season. “It was the green light I needed to give things a go and play with the flavour profile,” she says.
Three years down the track, Minoli says she still has the odd moment of “imposter syndrome”. “I look out at all the people enjoying our food and have to pinch myself,” she says. “It’s hard to believe it’s all happened in such a relatively short time. But it turns out that project management and running a restaurant have lots of transferable skills. I didn’t hate engineering, it just wasn’t my passion. Eating and sharing food has been my passion for as long as I can remember, and the rewards of cooking are so much more tangible than in my previous life.”
While Minoli is very hands-on at the restaurant and mans the pans most nights, her TV experience has opened the door to presenting opportunities. She’s recently returned from a month filming for a SBS TV series about the food of Peru and is hopeful more will follow. “Seriously,” she says. “Does it get any better? I get to travel the world talking about and eating great food. Plus I get paid to do it.” AC
