Chef Sashi Cheliah, MasterChef Australia 2018 winner, on how cooking has changed his life in more ways than one

The first Indian-origin chef to win MasterChef Australia, Cheliah is travelling across the kitchens of The Leela hotels to curate a special experience through a seven-course Malaysian and Singaporean-inspired dégustation menu. As he sat down for a quick chat, he revealed his India plans — to open Pandan Club in Chennai next month.

Eat Treat: Sambal Eggplant

“I hadn’t watched MasterChef before I applied to be a contestant,” he says, “my wife used to watch it and made me sign up. It was only after I was called for an audition that I would spend hours every evening catching up on previous seasons after work.” His day job for two decades before he made an appearance on the culinary show was that of a cop — he started working for Singapore Police’s STAR (Special Tactics and Rescue) team, but after moving to Australia in 2011 with his family, he worked with the Justice Department in Melbourne. In Adelaide, where the
43-year-old is now based, he worked for the Department for Correctional Services, or the prisons.
“I was always interested in cooking and the kitchen. From the age of 13-14 years, I have been trying my hand at various dishes. Cooking was the only thing I could do well besides law enforcement,” he says.

Eat Treat: Sweet and Sour Pork

After the MasterChef win, he went on to realise his dream of opening “a small pop-up or a cafe”. In 2019, he launched Gaja (Sanskrit for ele- phant), his first restaurant in Adelaide, that serves dishes influenced by Indian, Singaporean and Malaysian classics, while staying “authentically true to taste and full-to-the-brim with flavour.” “My inspiration is born from my mum’s South Indian cooking and growing up in Singapore to the wonderful flavours of Southeast Asia. They are robust, bold, fragrant and make you feel alive,” he says. Cheliah says the first day he stepped into the MasterChef kitchen, he thought it would be great if he could last 10 days. “But I kept winning challenges, and kept hoping I’ll stay for longer,” says the Singapore-born chef. It was after surviving the second round of eliminations that he became confident of his journey on the show. “It took those six months to change my life. I was away from family, it was stressful, and trust me, it is all unscripted — we get no time to prepare. It’s about that moment, it can go right or wrong.” In 2022, Cheliah returned to compete on the show’s 14th season, which featured a mix of returning contestants and new contenders. He was the sixth to be eliminated.

Eat Treat: Sambal Fish

At Zanotta, Cheliah had the 60-odd diners, including a 10-year-old fan, in thrall of his cooking, personalising it to suit individual palates and stopping by for plenty of selfies in between. But despite his fan following in the Capital, Cheliah says he chose Chennai as his first restaurant outpost for a reason: “Chennai has an authentic food culture, but is craving for more choices,” he says. The food at the 94-seater Pandan Club in T Nagar will be Peranakan and fairly traditional at that — with some wok stations, grills and barbecues. “The Peranakans are people from China who adopted Malay culture, so there is a strong Malaysian influence in their cooking. Even as a lot of ingredients are similar to Indian cuisine, they use a fair bit of fermentation, and the food has a strong umami flavour,” he says. Cheliah does not intend to open other franchises just yet, choosing instead to concentrate on building up a clientele in Chennai first. “On MasterChef, I had to worry about the three judges. Here, I need to please a lot more people who will come to dine, so I will be around in India a lot more,” says the man whose other change since his career switch has been equally dramatic — “I cannot define it, but I smile a lot more than I used to,” he says.