Creating Pathways to Employment Through Food
Plateful Café is a refugee-led charity creating pathways into employment through hospitality, while bringing communities together through food.
Through hospitality training, real catering experience, community food projects and partnerships, we create opportunities for refugees to learn, work, connect and build their future in the UK.
Our Story
Plateful Café began with a simple belief: people who arrive in the UK as refugees bring with them skills, knowledge, ambitions and cultures that deserve to be celebrated.
Our founder, Iolanda Chirico, has spent more than four decades supporting refugees and people seeking asylum. Through this work, she saw both the barriers’ people can face when rebuilding their lives in the UK and the extraordinary resilience and experience they carry.
Food offers a powerful way to bring people together.
Around a shared table, people can meet as equals. Food can cross language barriers, create friendships, and allow people to share something of themselves and their culture.
This has developed into a refugee-led charity, where lived experience informs our future direction. Our participants are not passive beneficiaries. They bring their ideas to help themselves and others to find employment and belonging.
Pathways into Hospitality
Refugees may face unfamiliar recruitment systems, limited UK work experience, language barriers, lack of professional networks and long periods away from employment while waiting for decisions about their status.
We help bridge that gap.
Our eight-week Introduction to Working in Hospitality program offers the opportunity to gain practical hospitality training.
We provide training in:
This program is a starting point, not an end point, with further opportunities to gain experience. Read more here.
Catering with a Purpose
Our chefs bring food traditions from around the world to corporate lunches, meetings, celebrations and community events across London.
Our catering provides opportunities for refugees to develop practical experience in a professional environment and earn income. Our chefs are paid at least the London Living Wage.
Catering is also an important source of income for Plateful Café, helping us build a charity that is less dependent on grants alone.
When an organisation chooses Plateful Café for its catering, it is doing more than buying lunch.
It is supporting refugees’ pathways towards employment.
A Place to Belong
Employment matters, but rebuilding a life is about more than finding a job.
People who have been displaced can experience isolation due to losing family and friendships that most of us rely on.
Through community dinners, pop-ups, and events, Plateful Café creates welcoming spaces where refugees, people seeking asylum, and local residents can meet naturally.
People eat together, practice English, make friends, and share cultures. And, ultimately, find a sense of belonging.
Our Impact
Since April 2023, Plateful Café has trained 60 people through our hospitality programme.
12 PROGRESSED INTO PERMANENT EMPLOYMENT
10 PROGRESSED INTO FURTHER EDUCATION
52 OF 60 PARTICIPANTS WERE AGED 18–30
Of the people we have trained, some are still waiting for decisions about their immigration status, while others have caring responsibilities or have progressed into education. Some have gone on to create a business of their own.
One example is Nubian Delights, a refugee-led food business that grew from Maysoon’s passion for baking and her involvement with Plateful Café. Read Maysoon’s story here.
We measure progress in many ways, and are proud to see people increase their knowledge, qualifications, and confidence through our training
Working in Partnership
Our work depends on collaboration with community organisations, employers, businesses, funders, volunteers, and organisations referring refugees to our programmes.
In 2026, our partnership with Blackfriars Settlement enabled us to relaunch our hospitality training programme and expand our activities in Southwark.
Collaboration provides opportunity that no single organisation could provide alone.
We are particularly interested in working with:
HOSPITALITY EMPLOYERS — who can provide work experience and employment.
BUSINESSES AND CORPORATE PARTNERS — who can book our catering, sponsor our work or introduce us to their networks.
COMMUNITY AND REFUGEE ORGANISATIONS — who can refer people to our training and collaborate with us.
KITCHEN AND VENUE PARTNERS — who can help us access the professional spaces we need to grow our training and catering activities.
Our Next Chapter
Demand for our training, catering, and community activities is growing.
Our next priority is to secure reliable access to a commercial kitchen from Thursday to Saturday, with appropriate storage and the flexibility to respond to catering opportunities.
A stable kitchen base would allow us to increase catering, create more paid work opportunities, strengthen our earned income, and support more refugees through hospitality training.
We are looking for organisations and partners who share our belief that opportunity, rather than dependency, creates lasting change.
Be Part of Our Story
There are many ways to help create opportunities through Plateful Café:
Food. Skills. Opportunity. Belonging.
Plateful Café — creating pathways into employment through food.