Shankar R. Santhiram

If you fail, you fail, la! When you fail, you're only allowed to mope for three days.

Three careers, one man, thirty years #

The most useful way to understand Shankar Santhiram is not through any single career but through the relationship between three careers that ran simultaneously for thirty years. The law career was refused before it began. The consulting career was built deliberately and well, into something durable. The culinary identity was the oldest of the three — the one that ran underground the longest, that surfaced first in Sussex kitchens and a 1999 Malacca restaurant and a 2016 leadership book and a TikTok channel with a quarter-million followers, before it finally won the negotiation in 2023, in Penang, at a restaurant that bears his name.

What distinguishes this arc is the quality of the stopping. Most founders who fail and return do so without reckoning with the first failure. Shankar Santhiram is unusual: he identified precisely what he lacked in 1999 — financial management, supply-chain discipline, time-management — and spent fifteen years acquiring each of those things in a domain adjacent to restaurants. The exile was not a retreat. It was a structured preparation.

By the time he opened Fire by Shankar in July 2023, he was no longer the culinary talent without a business foundation. He was a consulting principal with a national media profile, financial reserves built over twenty years, a staff who had survived a pandemic with him, and a city — Penang, his home city — that had never had a Tamil fine-dining restaurant. The identity that had been running underground finally had everything it needed.

The origin: a refusal in two acts #

He came back from Sussex in 1993 with an LLB (Hons) and his father’s expectation. The expectation was the Certificate in Legal Practice — the Malaysian bar-admission requirement. He refused to sit it. His father threatened eviction. He did not change his mind. He has never practised law.

The refusal was not, by his own account, an act of rebellion so much as a recognition: the legal career was not where he was going, and prolonging the pretence would cost him the years that mattered. What replaced law was not a plan but a series of attempts — some of which failed instructively.

In 1995 he raised RM100,000 and co-founded Kolej Utara, a private college in Ipoh. The small shareholding left him without protection when the partnership soured — he was pushed out. The lesson was expensive and precise: ownership structure is not a formality. He would not repeat that mistake in any subsequent venture. In 1997, running the Institut Teknologi Informasi in Malacca, he acquired his first corporate training client — a Matsushita HR director who saw something worth buying. That single client pointed toward the career that would fund the rest of the story.

Throughout all of this, the culinary identity ran alongside without disappearing. The £15 dinners in Sussex had not been an aberration. The cooking was always there, waiting for the correct moment and the correct resources.

The failure that was also a lesson #

In 1999 he opened The Indian Chapter in Malacca. It failed, in his own words, “big time.” The diagnosis he offered later was precise: “culinary skill but no financial management, supply-chain or time-management discipline.” He was a good cook running a restaurant he did not yet know how to run.

The decision that followed is the one that defines the arc. He did not try again immediately. He did not reopen in a different location or pivot to a different format. He stopped. Deliberately. For fifteen years.

“My first restaurant failed big time. So, I decided to stay away from the business for 15 years.”

That sentence — delivered to Buletin Mutiara in February 2023, a month before Fire by Shankar opened — reads as casual, almost offhand. It is not. It is the most considered decision in the arc. The culinary identity was not abandoned; it was placed in a holding pattern while he acquired the capacities it needed. He was in his late twenties when the Malacca restaurant closed. The exile would not end until he was in his mid-forties.

In 2002, he founded EQTD Consulting — EQ Training and Development, as the legal entity name suggests, though Shankar himself has not confirmed that reading of the acronym. The consulting firm grew methodically across the next decade. Clients came to include Petronas, Khazanah Nasional, CIMB, Western Digital, and B Braun — the roster of a practitioner taken seriously by the largest organisations in Malaysia. This was not a side career maintained while he longed for kitchens. It was a career built with genuine commitment, the proceeds of which would eventually make the restaurant possible.

In 2014 he co-founded Crackhouse Comedy Club in Kuala Lumpur — Malaysia’s first stand-up comedy club. The move reflected the same creative restlessness that had run through the arc, but it introduced a structural risk he could not fully see at the time. A co-owned public venue operating in the space where comedy met politically sensitive content, in a city where regulatory tolerance could shift without notice, was an exposure of a particular kind. He would understand that exposure clearly eight years later.

The return, calculated #

When Shankar Santhiram re-entered food and beverage in 2015, he was in his mid-forties. He acquired D’Legends, a restaurant in TTDI, Kuala Lumpur, with his wife as co-financier. The exile was ending on his terms: with reserves, with credibility, with a clear-eyed view of the skills the 1999 version of him had lacked.

The year that followed confirmed that the platform the consulting years had built was real. In 2016, So, You Want To Get Promoted? was published by MPH. It sold 5,000 copies by February 2021 — by Malaysian publishing standards, a national bestseller. He became an NST and FMT columnist, a regular on BFM and Lite FM radio. Before Fire by Shankar existed as a concept, Shankar Santhiram already had a media presence with a six-figure cross-platform audience and the credibility of a published author on leadership.

In 2019, he rebranded D’Legends as The Fire Grill. The decision, he said, was about identity: “running a bar didn’t fit with my whole branding.” The hundreds of thousands of ringgit the rebrand cost came three months before Malaysia’s first pandemic lockdown. The timing was not of his choosing.

Three crises, each convertible #

The MCO of March 2020 hit The Fire Grill as it hit every operator — dining rooms closed, the model suspended overnight. He kept all eight staff employed. When The Fire Grill’s Meals Initiative — a community-feeding programme funded partly by donations and partly by restaurant revenue — ran short of donor funds, he injected RM100,000 of his own money to honour the commitments his kitchen had made. The discipline in that decision was not sentimental. The staff who stayed through the pandemic were the ones who would eventually staff Penang.

The second crisis arrived in July 2021, when officers fined The Fire Grill RM5,000 — ostensibly for a technicality — in what he characterised publicly as an act of regulatory overreach. He was furious, and he said so: on Facebook, in his columns, on the radio. The anger was genuine. So was the media reach it was channelled through. A RM5,000 fine that might have been a private grievance became a national conversation. The “Little Napoleons” phrase entered the public record. For a founder with a quarter-million TikTok followers and a columnist’s pulpit, humiliation had an audience. He used it.

The third crisis was the most consequential. In July 2022, DBKL revoked Crackhouse Comedy Club’s operating licence following an incident involving a stand-up comedian and a joke about the tudung. The blacklist that followed — permanent, covering both co-founders — meant that Shankar Santhiram could no longer register a business in Kuala Lumpur. Six weeks later, the Meals Initiative concluded. Fourteen months later, The Fire Grill closed. He announced a Kuala Lumpur relaunch in September 2023; as of April 2026, it has not materialised. The geography of where he can build has permanently changed.

The third life, in Penang #

Fire by Shankar opened at Straits Quay, Penang, on 9 July 2023. The restaurant is Tamil fine dining — the first of its kind in the city. The menu is an elevated version of the cuisine he grew up eating, built around exactly the kind of conviction the 1999 Malacca version of him had not yet earned.

“The tosai we get outside is so thin you would have to fold it a few times, and drench it in curry to get some heft. This is not right.”

That sentence, from Buletin Mutiara in February 2023, is a chef’s manifesto compressed into a subordinate clause. It says: I know what this food should be, I know where the standard has been allowed to slip, and I am not going to let that stand. No formal culinary credentials underpin that conviction — Shankar Santhiram is self-taught, a feature of his path rather than a gap in it. His authority in the kitchen is the authority of someone who has cooked the same food for his whole adult life and thought seriously about why it matters.

The restaurant runs on a small team. Service is personal, shaped by his presence — and that presence is not always guaranteed. Some visits, the kitchen fires perfectly; others, the consistency that comes from a solo operator’s personal attention is harder to maintain in his absence. This is the growing pain of a restaurant whose identity is inseparable from its chef-patron. It is a familiar shape for founder-led dining rooms, and it is a shape the restaurant will have to negotiate as it matures.

What the platform built during the consulting years provides is unusual: bookings from Singapore and Australia driven not by guidebook listings but by a content following of approximately 700,000 across platforms. The Instagram feed, the TikTok channel, the columns — these are not marketing infrastructure retrofitted to the restaurant. They are the natural expression of a person who has been producing content about food, leadership, and culture for a decade. The restaurant arrived into a media presence that already existed. Most restaurants have to build that from zero.

He closed The Fire Grill in September 2023, with the Penang restaurant already open. The closure was not a crisis; it was a decision — to consolidate, to come home, to stop negotiating across two cities when one city had already given him what the other had taken away. The KL door is formally open. The blacklist keeps it practically closed. Both things can be true at once.

What the exile built #

There is a version of this story in which the fifteen years between 1999 and 2015 is a detour. Shankar Santhiram’s own telling resists that. The consulting years were not time lost to the culinary career. They were the precondition for it. The financial reserves that let him rebrand in 2019, inject RM100,000 in 2020, and absorb three crises in four years without collapsing — those came from EQTD. The media platform that fills a restaurant in Penang with diners from Singapore — that came from fifteen years of writing and broadcasting about leadership. The credibility that makes a chef-patron without formal credentials legible to investors and landlords — that came from the consulting roster.

“If you fail, you fail, la! When you fail, you’re only allowed to mope for three days.”

The line belongs to a person who has tested the rule. He failed in Malacca in 1999 and did not mope — or not, at least, for longer than the allowance he grants himself. He failed in Ipoh in 1995 and drew a lesson rather than a complaint. He was blacklisted in KL in 2022 and pivoted to Penang. The pattern is not resilience as a disposition. It is resilience as a practice, refined over thirty years of trial, and the failures are the data.

The universal lesson is not that founders should fail more. It is that stopping, when the stopping is deliberate and the exile is used, is not the opposite of success. It is the interval in which success becomes possible. Shankar Santhiram stopped for fifteen years. He spent those years building the platform that a 1999 Malacca restaurant could not have run on. When he returned, the food was the same. Everything else was different.

In Penang, in a restaurant that bears his name, the negotiation has finally resolved. The career that won was always the one he had been cooking toward.

Last updated: April 30, 2026