Shane Delia is about as far away from Melbourne’s restaurant scene as a chef can get.
He’s in a gym.
Delia, all 179 centimetres and 92 kilograms of him, looks totally at home as he emerges from the middle of the gym floor, carrying a lat pull-down bar and a sheen of sweat.
He’s also very hyped. “I’m not here to f— spiders,” he glares – possibly without meaning to – at Age photographer Chris Hopkins in response to some piece of small talk as he sets up in the corner of JPS Health & Fitness in Airport West, 10 minutes from Delia’s home.
The restaurateur is the sole owner of upmarket Middle Eastern restaurant Maha and its offshoots Maha East and Maha North, as well as Bar Jayda next door. He founded kebab chain Biggie Smalls, hosts charming travelogues on SBS, champions local businesses on Channel Nine’s Postcards, as well as acting as an ambassador for super fund Hostplus, the Western Bulldogs AFL team and Melbourne City Football Club.
But he is here almost every day, normally at 6am with his two teenage kids. “I need this, this centres my day,” says the 46-year-old, who left school in year 11 for a chef’s apprenticeship and once thought the only way he’d ever be in a Mercedes-Benz is if he stole one. Now, not only does he own a Mercedes, he is an ambassador for them.
Picking up on our previous interview, I ask if the workouts help with his anger? “Big time,” comes the reply. More on that later.
It has been a signature couple of weeks for Delia. Maha, named after his Lebanese wife, hosted a wildly successful series of Melbourne Food and Wine Festival events for Maltese Michelin-starred chef Jonathan Brincat. The couple just celebrated their 19th wedding anniversary up at the Lake House in Daylesford, run by his friend Alla Wolf-Tasker.
And in between he went with Maha, and their children, Jayda, 17 and Jude, 13, to Brisbane to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Layla, the modern Middle Eastern establishment he runs with Venues Live under operating licence in the prestigious Thomas Dixon performing arts centre.
It’s a busy life, but there’s always time for the gym, where he can give 150 per cent (very Delia) in this suburban family business (typical Delia) where the owners are his friends (peak Delia), who come around to his place at Christmas (extremely Delia).
He likes this place because it is in the western suburbs and down to earth – someone works out alongside their baby in a pram. “There’s no one taking photos of themselves,” he says, correcting himself with a smile before I get a chance to: “Apart from me.”
I ask if I have left anything out. “You know everything about me mate, that’s the scary bit,” he says disarmingly and charmingly (quintessential Delia). “I don’t know how you’re going to paint me. So we’ll see.”
Delia, wearing standard gym wear of a black Gymshark stringer top and a decidedly non-standard gold crucifix lined with tiny diamonds, wears his heart on his sleeve and tattoos across his body. His enormous bicep celebrates the Western Bulldogs’ 2016 premiership, his back depicts St Catherine, the patron saint of his family’s village on the Mediterranean island of Malta, one of the world’s smallest and most densely populated countries.
There’s also the Maltese Cross, the Delia family crest. The names of his wife and children and a cousin who passed away during lockdown from leukaemia. Also, an evil eye, similar to one found in Maha. “Everyone needs an evil eye to watch their back.”
More ink is on the way. “I’m halfway through a depiction of the siege of Malta, which is good for me because it shows our ancestral resilience and willingness to fight when we need to.”
This could not be more Delia. But come on Shane, it’s only food and beverage – not in the same league as the brave Knights Hospitaller of Malta repulsing the mighty invading Ottoman Empire in 1565 in one of the most famous sieges in history.
But I am wrong, and he is right. Delia has been fighting all his life. Still is.
A lunch visit to Maha
Maha sits halfway along Bond Street, an inconsequential street off Flinders Street on the not-so-fashionable western side of the CBD.
A glass wall is marked with a large gold disc that says, “Touch to Open”. Wave a hand and the glass slides away – a modern open sesame moment. The stairs and mirrored walls, edged with off-gold, lead down to a dining space of subterranean opulence, where a specially designed sweet scent wafts across to disguise food odours, and the tables are padded to dampen the noise from cutlery and glassware.
Delia hovers at the bar, radiating alpha/big kid/mildly apprehensive energy. His suit is modern, the T-shirt white and the sneakers even whiter.
On the menu: the extraordinary complexities of flavour Delia has created with his modern Middle Eastern cuisine. The snacks and mezze elegantly arrive – pan-seared Abrolhos Island scallop with champagne, saffron and caviar followed by torched scampi, harissa and white peach tart as well as whipped hummus, heirloom tomato and capsicums and toasted cumin.
These are served in such quantities that just as my stomach thinks we are nearing the end, it learns the mains are about to arrive – poached John dory with tomato and fennel, harissa oil and dill.
And yes, reputation demands I gratefully receive the signature dessert of Turkish delight doughnuts, rose honey and walnut ice cream.
But also on the menu, alongside the food – Delia’s own extraordinary complexities: Maha’s recent poor trading, his flirtation with online right-wing politics, his ruthlessness, his painful divorce from his “brother” George Calombaris, the messy failure of home delivery service Providoor, and Delia’s anxiety and fear.
Delia is ready for a confessional. He admits that during the past year, he had become “totally disengaged from the business”.
“The balance sheet noticed. Last October was our worst month in trading history in 18 years.”
Maha opened in 2008, “in the teeth of the global financial crisis”, and – like much of the industry – later went through the massive staff underpayments scandal, which engulfed the industry and forced a needed reset. (This occurred after Delia had exited the group.)
But then came COVID in 2020. And for Delia, the post-pandemic hangover lingers – one reason for his disconnect. Things needed to change.
“I’ve always been a strong believer in controlling the controllables, and the only thing I can control is me,” he says over lunch.
He realised that he had fallen out of love with his industry. “I felt like I was losing the battle. And I needed to re-spark that love.“
A boy from the western suburbs
“I wouldn’t have picked food or cheffing for Shane necessarily,” says Denis Johnstone, a friend of the Delia family from their childhood in St Albans. “He wasn’t the model student growing up, he had a lot of challenges channelling his energy into the right places,” says Johnstone, with the diplomacy of a school principal, which indeed he is.
Dean Cambray
When Delia was an apprentice chef “we used to go and hang out with him in Melbourne because all he did was work”.
“He’s been an incredible source of inspiration and motivation for me and our friends.”
As Maltese Catholics, Sunday was the most important day of the week for the Delia family. And not just because of church. For lunch the family would gather in Preston at the home of his mother Doris’ parents, who immigrated separately from Malta in the 1950s before meeting and marrying within months of arrival.
Dinner was at the home of Delia’s paternal grandfather, Carmelo, in Sunshine.
“The whole family. It’s 36 cousins, 16 aunties and uncles, plus the wider, Melbourne Maltese community that would come to my grandfather’s house for counsel,” says Delia, who is one of three children.
Nannu Nenu (grandfather Carmelo Delia) was his absolute hero, a police sergeant and prominent church leader back in Malta. And those family meals laden with Maltese pork sausages, pastizzi, roly-poly with orange blossom syrup – it all left an indelible impression that set his life’s path.
“Most definitely. And also, because I love being around my grandparents and the family, seeing how much joy us sharing a meal together brought. And I was good at it.”
Johnstone, who called Delia’s mum Auntie Doris and who was born in Australia to Maltese immigrants, attended the Sunday dinners, where people would sprawl everywhere, in the dining room, in the living room, out the back, in the garage.
The meals were a sign of a family mission accomplished. Shane’s father, Ted Delia, had arrived in Australia in 1970 alone, having turned 18 on the voyage, tasked by his parents to travel across the world and set up home for his parents and eight sisters who followed four years later.
“My dad came out to assimilate. My dad came here to be Australian, not to be a Maltese person living in Australia. And I think that is the Australian story,” Delia says.
“I’m so f—ing proud to be Australian. And because of people like my father, who came to Australia, for the betterment of Australia.”
“The most Australian guy that my dad knew, his name was Shane. So he called me Shane.”
Shane Delia
Ted insisted on speaking English at home and not Maltese. He named his son Shane, even though the Maltese word xejn, pronounced the same way, means “nothing”.
“But the most Australian guy that my dad knew, his name was Shane. So he called me Shane.”
Delia says his father didn’t want his son to be confronted with the same racist experiences he had – overlooked for jobs, paid at a lower rate. “Yes, he did suffer all those things. But not to a point where he felt like he was, you know, bullied, harassed, [or] make them feel unwelcome.
“It was just a part of life. As Maltese, we were resilient, you’d get over it. You know, we had the English doing it to us in our own country. So, it wasn’t a first time.”
Ted worked at the Dunlop factory across the road from Western Oval, and became a Western Bulldogs supporter as did his son. Delia later gifted his father a seat at the stadium as a Father’s Day present.
‘Our relationship suffered’: Meeting George Calombaris
Prod a guy with big muscles and often a fat school kid comes waddling out.
“I never had a chance to play sport as a kid. I was always a fat, dumpy little Maltese boy who was in trouble all the time and never played any team sports. I wasn’t allowed to because I was always in trouble. I had chronic asthma, was unfit, had body image issues. So I didn’t want to either.”
At Keilor Downs Secondary College, Delia was one of the first children in the state to be diagnosed with what was then called attention deficit disorder, and he took part in an early program at Sunshine Hospital, novel at the time, and received experimental medication including dexamphetamine Ritalin, which turned his school grades of Cs, Ds and Fs into As and Bs.
He left school in year 11 to take up an apprenticeship at Eden on the Park, which included trade school in Geelong. He was a teenager without a licence, so his dad and grandfather would drive him down after the Sunday dinners. There Carmelo would slip him $50, telling him: “Hey, this is for you to get through the week. I’m really proud of you, keep going.”
It was during those apprentice years that his life turned a corner and he met George Calombaris.
Delia shifts in his seat at Maha, and the emotion is on his face. The pair, he says, are now friends.
“Yeah, no, we are. I can say that honestly, knowing that we weren’t for a while. It was tough after we’d split up.”
During the apprentice years, Calombaris, one year older, helped Delia to get a job at the Sofitel, at that time nicknamed the pirate ship – a legendary hothouse of chef talent, where apprentices learnt classic French fine dining at Le Restaurant.
“He and I were the best of friends. So we did our apprenticeship together. I used to sleep on the floor of his mum’s house,” Delia says.
Later, when Delia was zooming up the ranks at the Yarra Valley’s Chateau Yering Hotel, Calombaris, riding high on the success of Greek fine diner Press Club, recruited Delia to be the chef at the Middle Eastern venue he and his backers were planning. Maha was born in 2008, and Melbourne loved it. St Katherine’s in Kew, mixing Mediterranean, Greek, Turkish and Middle Eastern, followed in 2011.
“There’s two words that got Shane to where we are at this stage in our lives: hard work.”
George Calombaris
But after five years, in 2013, came the split. Delia exited Calombaris’ Made Establishment group, taking full ownership of Maha – and nothing else. It was a result of many things, and Delia wanting to be a “lead actor” as he puts it, which went against the ambitions of the Made group. The split was reported amicably, but behind the scenes, it was anything but.
“When the business fell apart, our relationship suffered for a number of years, which was super tough,” Delia says.
The pair didn’t speak for years until the high of the underpayments scandal and the placing of Made into voluntary administration, which saw Delia reach out to his old friend. “He’s still my brother. I still care for him, even though … Brothers fight, you know?”
After lunch, Calombaris’ face stares out at me on a poster on Toorak Road South Yarra, promoting the chef’s pop-up at the Ovolo Hotel. When that venture was announced, one of the first to congratulate him was Delia.
“It’s a beautiful relationship as we speak,” Calombaris says.
“We went quiet for a time and I won’t lie to you – I regret it.
“To be quite honest with you, it was stupidity. Two young chefs who were being egotistical and small brats.”
It stung when Calombaris came across an updated version of Delia’s cookbook – and found Delia had removed the foreword his old friend had written for the first edition. “I get that sort of anger,” he says now.
“I am really proud of him. There’s two words that got Shane to where we are at this stage in our lives: hard work.”
Circle of influence
Early in the research process for this profile, Delia’s publicist Karla Dawes sends through a list Delia’s friends available for comment:
Craig Tiley, outgoing chief executive of Tennis Australia; Andrew McConnell, celebrated chef; David Elia, chief executive of HostPlus; Luke Beveridge, coach of the Western Bulldogs; Kate Langbroek, comedian and presenter; Kylie Watson-Wheeler, managing director of The Walt Disney Company Australia and New Zealand and president of the Western Bulldogs; Anthea Loucas-Bosha, chief executive of Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.
That isn’t even the half of it. Delia bought his old house in a pub from Peter Siddle, the cricketer. He spent his wedding anniversary with Alla Wolf-Tasker at The Lake House in Daylesford. After our lunch interview he is off to the birthday bash for Andrew Bassat, the co-founder of jobs site Seek and president of the St Kilda footy club.
Flowing from that is an extraordinary ability to then do business with these movers and shakers. Watson-Wheeler, who has an enormous number of people in her orbit, nevertheless speaks of Delia’s “very authentic space of friendship”. Many talk of him being the first person to offer help when needed – whatever the circumstance.
Craig Tiley, the outgoing chief executive of Tennis Australia and mastermind behind the expansion of the Australian Open, counts Delia as one of his closest friends.
“If I had any difficulty and something I needed help with, he would be the first person I would reach out to, Shane, and he would be one of the first people to respond,” declares Tiley, who is leaving Australia midyear to take up a job as chief executive of the US Tennis Association.
The men met not long after Tiley moved to Melbourne from the US, at a ball to promote the meat and livestock industry. Tiley and his wife, Ali, were seated with the Delias.
“We hit it off and became friends – our kids are a similar age and Shane became one of my closest friends, and Maha became one of the closest friends to my wife Ali.
“What I really liked about him was he was constantly challenging himself, pushing himself and finding ways to do better.”
Melbourne’s twin obsessions of food and sport meet annually during the three-week Australian Open carnival, which under Tiley became a festivalisation and celebration of Melbourne restaurants, cuisine and produce.
He credits this in part to Delia.
“Shane was the original one who encouraged me to celebrate Melbourne. He saw it as a way to expand and promote the business and we saw that as a partnership opportunity,” Tiley says.
“I always find it funny when people want to throw stones. I’m like, ‘what did you do? You did nothing. You crawled up under your blanket and hid waiting for the government to pay’.”
Shane Delia
It is one of the many circumstances where the restaurateur seems to move frictionlessly between friendship and business. But is clear that Tiley values Delia enormously, particularly in times of difficulty, such as when Tiley found himself at the centre of global controversy in January 2022 when Novak Djokovic arrived for the Australian Open and was detained by immigration officers and had his visa cancelled.
“Whenever there were difficult things going on with us in COVID, he would be the first to reach out and have a chat,” Tiley says.
When Delia was in primary school he thought everyone was working class and ethnic.
He thought of this years later when he was setting up St Katherine’s in Kew and drove past Xavier College. “What the f— is that? It’s like Hogwarts,” he recalls.
“I had never seen anything like that in my life. And the penny dropped right then: that’s why these people I am meeting now through my restaurant have always had this upper hand. I went to school in a portable. The roof used to leak.
“But I’ve got something they haven’t got. I’m a lot stronger than they are. They have to ask for things, I take it. I don’t need permission.”
He’s smiling and lighthearted, but can’t deny the ruthlessness.
“That’s the way it is. You know, I’ve had to learn from being a boy from the western suburbs … like I said earlier, there’s two types of people – those that wonder what will happen and those that make things happen.”
‘If I’m going to take the glory, I have to take the bullets’
When Shane and Maha were riding high, and, as Delia puts it, the cars in the driveway of their home in Sydenham were worth more than their house, the couple contemplated moving to Toorak or South Yarra.
In stepped David Elia, the chief executive of superannuation fund Hostplus, who staged an intervention, telling the couple: “It’s not who you are.”
The couple settled in Moonee Ponds instead. Near Elia, as it happens, who arrived in Australia with his family in 1976 aged six from war-torn Beirut.
“Keeping up with the Joneses can get people a little bit into trouble,” says Elia, who hired Delia to be an ambassador for the fund, which was set up for hospitality and tourism workers.
“I think my mum’s a better cook than Shane,” says Elia, adding, “What I love about Shane is his unrestricted Middle Eastern cuisine.”
Just as Elia is one of Delia’s many advisers, Andrew Bassat, co-founder of Seek, is another.
Bassat was an investor in Providoor, Delia’s brainchild for a ready-to-cook home delivery meal service that flourished during COVID lockdowns and was a lifeline for many high-end restaurants.
Sales income peaked at $45 million in 2021-22 before the business collapsed in April 2023, despite the attempts of Bassat and others to negotiate an outcome. Thousands of giftcard holders were left owed $4.2 million, according to a liquidators’ report to creditors.
That must have been bad for him?
“No, it was great. I mean, the negativity was bad.”
What Delia means is that he is proud of the business that in 15 months delivered more than 600,000 orders and kept high-end restaurants alive during lockdowns.
“I always find it funny when people want to throw stones. I’m like, ‘what did you do? You did nothing. You crawled up under your blanket and hid waiting for the government to pay’.”
“When Fair Work goes after Coles, for $200 million, no one stops buying their cabbages, they keep going,” he says in defence of both himself and Calombaris (the real figure pursued by the Fair Work Ombudsman was closer to $115 million).
“But when someone with a profile is put out there, they come for them. And I can understand that. I’m a big boy. If I’m going to take the glory, I have to take the bullets, that’s fine. I fully accept the accountability.”
“I have got more to lose now than ever. This is the scariest time of my life.”
Shane Delia
Delia blames the collapse of the business on key investor Collins St Asset Management pulling funding after exercising a clause in its contract.
The former chief executive of Providoor, Tim MacKinnon, who is now chief executive of sport software provider PlayHQ, also believes the business could have continued if the investor, Collins St, had kept its money in. He absolves Delia of blame over the non-refunded giftcards.
“He didn’t have any choice about whether he could repay the giftcards,” MacKinnon says.
Giftcard purchasers were unsecured creditors, and Collins St was ahead of them in the queue.
MacKinnon praises Delia and still has a relationship with him. “We went through hell, but we never stopped talking.”
‘I’ve got a terrible filter’: Delia’s Charlie Kirk moment
Delia has been a presenter on Nine’s local travel program Postcards for years and recently returned to SBS, after a long hiatus, with a program on Malta.
“I’d sometimes feel maybe I’m not politically correct to be on SBS. So I don’t know if I said or upset someone along the way. Highly likely, I’ve got a terrible filter.”
Delia now has a new determination after spending much of last year feeling like a victim – a position he hates.
“I have got more to lose now than ever. This is the scariest time of my life.
“I’m scared, because I’m not the fighter I used to be. I was ruthless. I didn’t fear anything. I would break through a wall and then deal with the rubble later.”
He says a moment came when he realised he would not put his family at risk and he was more conscious now of “doing things the right way”.
After he posted online about his love for Australia Day, and lamented the murder of US conservative activist Charlie Kirk, hospitality progressives rubbished him online, and riposted that Maha had turned MAGA.
Delia says the blowback hurt him and his family.
“I constantly try to shield my children from spending too much time on social media, and then I’m the hypocrite sitting there, just doom-scrolling … and they take you down another rabbit hole.
“But I was probably more extreme in certain views than I should have been,” he says carefully. “It was feeding into, I suppose, the fear and the downward slope that I was feeling about business at the time.”
Now he is older, wiser and calmer, throwing himself into a reset of the business.
“I always thought of myself as a good cook. But there are far better chefs than me.
“I have always thought of myself as a good people person. I won’t say businessman. Relationships are the currency – and experience. Everything else you can buy.”
As to the future, Delia would love to open a Maha maybe in Singapore, maybe in Europe.
“I call our food unrestricted Middle Eastern, because in Australia, we can do things unrestricted, right? We are young, we’re free. It’s in our anthem.”
Our time is nearly over. The lunch and the interview are ending and the recorder is off. It is time for final impressions. Delia looks directly at me and opens his mouth to speak.
“I hope I didn’t bore you.”
The author was a guest of Delia Group for lunch at Maha.
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