Nouria Salehi - The Afghan Gallery

March 1997

Nouria Salehi started in the restaurant business for the most unusual of reasons.

Not to entertain friends, not for ego, not for passion of food, not to make money but as the only way in 1983 that she could provide jobs in order to sponser her family from Afghanistan to Australia.

What makes it even more surprising is that she started The Afghan Gallery in Brunswick Street whilst working full time as senior physicist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

This meant going to work via the Victoria Market, loading up with fruit and vegetables, then racing to Brusnwick Street after work to get ready for dinner. It was hard physical work and “the car always smelt of onions”. It was also a real challenge then to convince people to try a completely foreign food.

Nouria’s was the first Afghan restaurant in Victoria and the early customers, even in the avant garde Brunswick Street territory, were very cautious.

“They would bring in their bottle of wine but ask that it not be opened till they had tried the first course, in case they decided they didn’t want to stay for main course,” she recalls.

Nouria furnished the restaurant with Afghan carpets and prints and created upstairs Australia’s first “tent room” with cushions on the floor, “ a completely authentic Afghani way of seating”. In the first year Nouria did all the shopping and most of the cooking. Her brother, Aziz helped in the kitchen and her sister in law, Kaye and some Australian friends, would serve the tables. “We put numbers beside the dishes on the menu to make it easier to remember what people had ordered as no one could remember the names of the food. I changed the dishes quite a lot because some of our food in Afghanistan is completely meat based and approx 45-50% of our customers were vegetarians. So I changed it for them. Seasoning, I did not change”.

Nouria explained that food in Afghanistan is not hot. “We don’t use much curry like India or Pakistan. Our cuisine is based on coriander, garlic, salt and pepper.” A favourite at the Afghan Gallery is ashak, fried eggplant with yoghurt sauce. Nouria explained that this dish used to be done with cream but now they use yoghurt to make it less rich. Also instead of deep-frying some of their dishes, these are now baked because people want less fatty food. A pastry traditionally stuffed with leeks is filled in Melbourne with spring onions because leeks in Afghanistan are softer and smaller.

For eleven years The Afghan Gallery was Melbourne’s only Afghan restaurant, there are now two others which Nouria helped establish. When she first started sponsoring Afghans, there were only 5 Afghan families in Melbourne, now there are 390 families, a population of 1600 including children.

As well as assisting with her business sponsorship, Nouria has worked tirelessly to help the refugees settle successfully. She has long been involved with Amnesty International and Red Cross, she worked at the Afghan Australia Council, started the Afghan Support Group in 1993, is on the Executive Committee of the Refugee Council of Australia and is involved with the Refugee Women Network started in 1995 for all refugee women around Australia. On March 8 there is a Refugee Womens Day at the YWCA.

The Afghan Gallery has more than succeeded in Nouria’s original ambition. It has employed and sponsored many Afghans and has given them an identity in a country where their small population could easily be swamped. And it is for this reason that Nouria feels it important to continue the business.

“It’s become a part of me and of my life, and to me it’s vital to Afghan culture. Afghanistan has become more and more a forgotten country so I think that by serving people at least here and in providing Afghan food that I’m keeping its identity. It’s a small restaurant but it’s important in that”. The Afghan Gallery is at 327 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy; phone: 9417 2430.