romesh dissanayake

INFO

Name	romesh dissanayake (he/him)
Born	1988
Country of Birth	Kazakhstan
Place of Residence	Naarm Melbourne
Ethnicities	Sri Lankan, Koryo-saram
Artform	Literature, Culinary arts
Decades Active	2020s

ABOUT

romesh dissanayake is a chef, writer and poet who was based in Pōneke Wellington and is currently living in Naarm Melbourne.

dissanayake was born in Kazakhstan. From the ages of 5 to 8 he lived in Sri Lanka, and from there lived in Aotearoa. He has been a chef since 2008, a line of work that has taken him to many countries. When he was 24, he returned to Sri Lanka for 8 months to work as a chef in Madulkelle, a village located within Central Province, and to reconnect with his culture through food. In recent years, he has taken the skills he has learned in restaurant kitchens and shifted them into his extended creative pursuits.

In 2019, dissanayake was working at Rita, a converted worker's cottage turned small boutique restaurant on the main street of Aro Valley in Pōneke. It was there that he hosted the first in a series of Sri Lankan culinary pop-ups, named Seela after his grandmother. dissanayake felt compelled to create these events after the March 2019 shooting in Ōtautahi. Two days after the first pop-up, on Easter Sunday, three hotels and three churches were bombed in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Bookended by tragedies fuelled by extremism, dissanyake chose to respond to these unimaginable circumstances with an opposing act of care and service. These two events celebrated the sacred cultural exchange of sharing food that stemmed from several generations of familial knowledge.

In many of dissanayake’s creative pursuits, he aims to challenge the capitalist model of the hospitality industry. In these pop-ups, for instance, he did so by approaching them like an art installation, having a rustic approach to serving the food as if it was a domestic setting, and donating the profits to the Colombo Easter Bombing relief fund. He invited other creatives to collaborate with him on the events, to sew napkins, create ceramic dishes and design the posters, allowing each contributor to interpret the event and its needs through their own lens.

dissanayake’s interest in fusing art and culinary experiences extended to assisting artist Ruby White on the opening night of her exhibition Pieces of (2021) at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space. A team, including dissanayake, used White’s functional ceramic cookers to serve food at the opening. As dissanayake wrote about this experience in his text responding to the exhibition, the participants “are the art and make it in real time through consuming the food and enjoying the conversation. This stimulus allows visitors to be aware of their bodies, their identities, their systems of beliefs.”

Food is a throughline in dissanayake’s writing. His novel When I open the shop centres on a man who opens a noodle shop on the Terrace in Pōneke using an inheritance he gains after his mother’s passing. dissanayake’s titular character grapples with his grief, his inability to describe it and the manifestations of his repressed guilt, while also trying to understand why his business is struggling. This novel was published in March 2024 through Te Herenga Waka Victoria University Press.

dissanayake’s approach to writing touches on being a New Zealander, being removed from culture, being a man, and of course, food. As he discussed, it’s about “all the things I have trouble accepting about myself.” dissanayake’s poetry is also featured alongside two other poets in AUP New Poets 10, published by Auckland University Press in May 2024. In the chapbook-length collection, Favourite Flavour House, dissanayake shares their perspective as a Koryo-Saram Sri Lankan person growing up in Aotearoa.