Chand Sahrawat is one half of a husband-and-wife team behind some of Auckland's most celebrated restaurants — Cassia, the modern Indian dining room in a Fort Lane basement that helped redefine high-end Indian food in New Zealand, and Sid at The French Cafe. She also runs ready-made curry sauce line Cassia at Home and hosts culinary tours to India. This week she added a very different title to the list: author.
Her new book, After Me Too: A Guide to Thriving After Sexual Abuse, is the guide she wishes she'd had decades ago. Sahrawat, who was born in India and moved to New Zealand in 2002 for study, writes openly about abuse that began when she was seven, about a traumatic first childbirth that triggered dissociation she now recognises from her childhood, and about the day a frightening thought at a mothers' group sent her straight to her GP. The abuse itself is confined to a single chapter she tells readers they can skip — she deliberately wrote a practical, compassionate roadmap rather than a memoir that might retraumatise.
The book draws on serious credentials: a psychology and English degree, postgraduate counselling qualifications and a coaching certificate, plus her new life coaching venture, Goal Getters. She's candid that recovery isn't a finish line — she still takes daily antidepressants and schedules basics like eating and sleeping — but points to moments that mark how far she's come, like confronting men harassing women at an Indian temple during last year's culinary tour.
Her story even has a travel thriller attached. In March, the couple was stuck in Dubai en route to host a tour when missiles flew during the US–Israel–Iran escalation. They ended up on a repatriation flight out of Fujairah at 3am, tickets paid via a WhatsApp link, unaware even of the airline.
For travellers, there are a couple of reasons to care. If you're eating your way through Auckland, Cassia and Sid at The French Cafe are among the city's flagship tables, both shaped by the Sahrawats' fine-dining pedigree (they opened Sidart in Ponsonby back in 2009). And if food-focused travel to India appeals, Sahrawat hosts small-group culinary tours — now run by someone with a notably clear-eyed love of the country she once thought she'd left behind. "I can be alone in the city as a woman. I don't hate the city anymore," she said after writing the word "peace" in the sand in Goa.
Mostly, though, this is a story about a well-known figure in New Zealand dining choosing to go public, and building something useful out of it — for survivors, their partners and anyone trying to understand how trauma shapes a life, a marriage and even a birth plan.
