Collabs
Straight from the pot : ጉራሻ [Gursha]
Sponsored by Blacktown Arts Council
From Addis Ababans to Sydneysiders.
When Gursha’s head chef, Rahel Woldearegay set off from Addis Ababa to visit her sister in Australia over two decades ago, she never imagined that she’d call anywhere but Ethiopia home. But just a few years later, she would. In the early 2000’s Rahel, now married to Yibeltal with two young daughters, migrated to Sydney and settled in the city’s west.
The transition was rough at first.
‘It was hard coming here with two children. In Ethiopia I had a lot of family, everything I did was with family. So it was very hard for me when I came’, Rahel remembers. At the time, Sydney’s Ethiopian community was still quite small, and Yibeltal cites this as a contribution to initial feelings of isolation.
‘Everyone was spread out back then. We didn’t have a chance to communicate with many Ethiopians’ Yibeltal says. ‘We only saw them once a week through the Orthodox church. We had a chance to socialise and speak with each other, which we still do.’
However, as time wore on, the community grew and the family adjusted. Yibeltal was the family’s breadwinner as a taxi driver, and Rahel was a stay at home mum. Life in Australia was for the most part, smooth sailing now. But Rahel’s first passions, cooking and hosting, lingered in the back of her mind.
When both kids got older and she had more time on her hands, Rahel recalls thinking to herself: ‘This is the best time to open a restaurant’.
And so Gursha was born.
Why Gursha?
With Yibeltal’s encouragement Rahel agreed to take the big leap and Gursha was established in 2017.
So what’s the story behind Gursha’s name? According to Rahel, they named it at their oldest daughter’s behest, who insisted that it had a ring to it.
Yibeltal explains, ‘In Ethiopian traditional way of eating food, we use our hands to eat, no forks or other things. Wrapping the bread (injera), we feed ourselves and others, and this is part of our tradition. Especially (feeding) elders for youngers, husbands for their wives, dads for their kids. This act of feeding another person like this is called gursha.’
The perks and pitfalls
of running a restaurant.
It’s generally estimated that 85% of new restaurants close within a year of first opening. When this statistic is recited to them, Rahel and Yibeltal hardly seem surprised.
Gursha’s first few years were challenging, with the couple having to use their own money to keep the restaurant afloat, and Yibeltal continuing to work his day job as a taxi driver. Just as things were starting to look up, COVID-19 hit and like all restaurants at the time, Gursha was dealt a devastating blow. But the post lockdown boom and some positive media coverage meant that by the end of 2021, business was booming. Yibeltal credits websites like Broadsheet and Time Out for broadening Gursha’s exposure to people from all over Sydney.
But as great as business is right now, owning and running a business is not for the faint of heart.
‘We used to work her seven days a week’, Rahel remembers. ‘But now we give ourselves Tuesdays off. We need that time. We don’t socialise like we used to.’
‘We try to get to church on Sundays, but we usually miss a lot of it to come back to the restaurant and start preparing for lunch time customers’, adds Yibeltal.
Despite this, the couple are positively glowing when they speak about the success of their restaurant. When asked about her favourite part of running Gursha, Rahel giggles and says:
‘When people finish my food. Oh my God, I need a clean plate. That’s my favourite!’
Her husband smiles and nods knowingly.
It seems Gursha is treating Rahel and Yibeltal quite well.
