Written by Fran Molloy
The delightfully named, Lentil as Anything chain of restaurants in Melbourne are doing very well, despite – or perhaps because of - their policy of not setting a price for any of the food on their menus.
At Lentil As Anything customers pay what they think the meal is worth, putting their money in a box as they leave.In a country where 'doing a runner' on a restaurant bill is almost a rite of passage for some groups of young men, the Lentil chain is doing well; they estimate that about twenty percent of their patrons don't pay, often people with limited resources who struggle to feed themselves.
Some volunteer to work off their meal washing dishes or peel potatoes; others play music for the restaurant's customers or donate a work of art. One customer paved the courtyard garden of the St Kilda restaurant.
And for many, the welcoming atmosphere of the restaurants and the great food is worth a substantial amount: recently, one group of diners left $1,000 for a few vegetarian burgers, while just last year, one diner donated a house. The house has since been converted into a home for refugees, many of whom are key staff members of the Lentil restaurants.
Restaurant founder, Shanaka Fernando, says that his key ambition when he started the first restaurant was to encourage an atmosphere of trust and compassion and to break down barriers.
He heaps praise on his staff and customers. "You have to recognise the extraordinary levels of commitment people have in order to make this work, especially the people who come and eat there every day, to support this unconventional idea," he says.
In 2001, Shanaka used his life savings to set up a small vegetarian restaurant, named Lentil as Anything, in St Kilda. "I started with an indigenous chef and a couple of people with blissfully unstable backgrounds, from drug dependency to homelessness."
He says that he hoped that the lives and stories of these people might have some chance of getting validation and that the restaurant would provide a focal point for marginalised people.
"I knew that as long as we made good food and maintained a passion for what we were doing that it would have a place in the community, but it was so unusual I was happy as long as it survived for about three months, I thought, okay then I will have proved my point."
The restaurant didn't just survive – it thrived; and, deciding to live his Buddhist ideals, Shanaka relinquished his capital in the restaurant. Lentil became a non-profit Incorporated Association and has been formally classified as a Public Benevolent Institution.
Federal Government legislation only grants this classification to groups whose dominant purpose is "the direct relief of poverty, sickness, destitution, suffering or misfortune, and for the benefit of the community or a section of it."
With its provision of free meals to those who cannot afford to pay, training opportunities for those who have been marginalised and even crisis accommodation for the homeless, Lentil as anything has become a very different – and hugely successful – not for profit community organisation, employing and training around 150 people in the restaurants.
Eight years later, Lentil as Anything is a Melbourne institution and Shanaka has toured Australia, invited by a wide range of people to speak about his achievements; most are keen for a local Lentil as Anything to be set up in their own town.
Some full-time employees are fullyqualified chefs and floor managers, while others are on training allowances, completing a mentoring program through the Department of Immigration. The training is intense, with most outlets averaging around 100 meals an hour.
Employees include people who are new migrants, refugees, people who have disabilities or are dealing with substance abuse or mental illness. Some have criminal records, some are long-term unemployed who have been marginalised for most of their lives.
The group also provides crisis accommodation, English tutoring, homework assistance – even driving lessons. Lentil as Anything now has an outlet at the Abbotsford Convent, in Brunswick, in St Kilda, they run the kiosk at Artplay in the city and began this year to run the canteen at the Collingwood College primary school. Two more sites are being negotiated at the moment.
Shanaka says that the Collingwood canteen is the most organised of all of his venues because they have a consistent customer base – of around 600 children each day. As with all of his restaurants, Shanaka says that good food is the key to success at the school canteen. "The kids are very honest critics, they just will not eat anything unless it tastes good."
The food at all of the restaurants is vegetarian – with a great variety of ethnic influences, inspired by his mostlymigrant staff of African, Middle Eastern, Vietnamese, Indian and Japanese backgrounds.
Shanaka is a migrant himself, arriving in Australia from Sri Lanka in 1989, at the age of twenty.
Born to a Sri Lankan father and Irish mother, he had an unconventional childhood, raised in a wealthy household with servants and an extended family which included his aunt, a famous sculptor whose studio was the family kitchen, and an uncle who was a triple international sportsman who played cricket for Sri Lanka and Davis Cup tennis. Shanaka left his high-achieving family to study law at Melbourne University, but lost interest and didn't stay long in the course.
A range of jobs followed, in fruit shops, helping elderly people and also dancing and acting; he performed in more than a hundred shows with a theatre group in the Melbourne Fringe Festival and eventually at the Melbourne Comedy Festival.
His Catholic parents had insisted he have a Buddhist education, and Shanaka decided in 1992 to pursue a longheld ambition to become a Buddhist monk, travelling to a forest monastery in Western Australia. He didn't last long there, either.
"Unfortunately, there was a very beautiful Buddhist nun in the monastery and I ended up having a torrid affair with her and I got kicked out," he recalls, with a cheeky grin. He spent the next six years travelling around the world.
"The experiences I got from those travels are what I think formulated the idea of what I'm doing now, which is to bring cultures and people together and basically for people to just sit and eat and talk without boundaries."
"That's what I experienced in the third world through my travels and I notice that when people eat and their needs are satisfied there's a nice big ray of conviviality and culture that brings them together."
Returning to Australia in 2001, Shanaka had around $40,000 that he had raised through a cottage industry of recycled silk saris; it was just enough to start up the first restaurant - and the rest is history.
Shanaka says that he is in the process of stepping back a bit, wanting to spend more time with his nearly-four year old daughter, Grace.
"When I started Lentil as Anything, my long-term partner realised my involvement and my passion was with the restaurant and she wanted a more conventional lifestyle where the man worked and brought money home and we went shopping to Bunnings together and bought pot plants, which is certainly not the direction I was heading in."
A few years later, his ex-partner was keen to have a child and asked Shanaka to be the father. "I agreed to that, being a fan of unconventional models and so I have Grace with me three days a week and that seems to be working quite well." Life hasn't always been so cruisy; but Shanaka, who relinquished all his capital in the businesses and turned them into a not-for-profit charity soon after they began, says that he lives very simply.
For more than two years, he lived in a waterfront, he says. Actually, it was a tent on the Elwood foreshore – and when local papers got hold of the story, he attracted much attention from Port Philip Council's officers, who often moved him on. "Some of the media called me a millionaire who owned five restaurants, which was quite amusing because I don't have any assets and I've probably got about $70 in my bank account at any time. They asked me why I lived in a tent and I said I misunderstood my Buddhist teacher who asked me to go out there and live with intent."
Shanaka says that he has no desire to accumulate money or possessions but feels hugely rewarded because he has had the opportunity to promote a culture of trust and benevolence in society.
