An end-of-year note from Iolanda

By Fiona
February 6, 2026

Dear Readers,

2026 is here, and what a year we have had! The Plateful Café team hopes that your transition into the New Year has been a smooth one, and thanks you for your continued support. It is what motivates us to carry on.

In this edition, you’ll find a heartfelt address from our founder Iolanda Chirico as well as reflections from both volunteers and customers and alike. Last but certainly not least, it will offer a glimpse into a couple of the amazing events that Plateful has to come this January.

Rest assured, this month’s newsletter this will no doubt be as exciting as Plateful expects the year to come shall be…

And end of year note from Iolanda

Thank you for your support in what has been quite the rollercoaster year for Plateful

Café.

The biggest challenge ever remains the lack of a permanent venue.

Despite an ever-increasing demand for our catering services, presence at pop ups

and events, we continue to cook and deliver food from my house. In 2025 we have

catered for over fifty events all over London, but predominantly in south-east.

Quite often, we cook over three days for a single event due to a lack of storage and space

to accommodate multiple cooks each time in a domestic kitchen. I am the

shopper, cook, cleaner, driver, fundraiser, coordinator, networker, advocate and so

many more roles that it would be impossible to list them all. It is exhausting!

As a Founder I have a moral responsibility to keep going in the interest of others and

to continue to make a difference in the locality and in the lives of so many people. I

continue to believe that we can find ways to change the narrative on migration and

rolling up her sleeves to make it happen. We have travelled so far but the journey

continues to be so long and arduous on the road to finding our home.

I continue to be privileged to work with a wonderful team of volunteers supporting all

our efforts as we are still volunteer-run and refugee-led.

It is not an understatement to say that the whole team has had to dig deep this year,

with their trademark passion and commitment. Holding our mission in mind and

navigating anti-migration sentiment in the UK has only made us more determined to

realise our vision. As we look towards 2026, we remain driven by the belief that

Britain’s story is richer, deeper, and more interconnected than the headlines suggest.

A permanent Plateful Café will be a place where that full picture is visible, celebrated

and understood. Being a place where everyone can feel that they belong is central

to everything we do and the training which we hope to restart.

~ Iolanda Chirico

Our Amazing Volunteers

Before launching into some of the incredible things our volunteers had to say about the organisation, a quick acknowledgement of their dedication must first be made. With 48 volunteers spread across eight teams of various operations, Plateful Café truly embodies what it means to be volunteer-run. A big thank you to all of you – your efforts do not go unnoticed.

“My decision to volunteer with Plateful stemmed from my awareness of the disadvantages and struggles of refugees and asylum-seekers in the UK. Plateful’s aim to reduce socio-economic and ethnic inequality resonates with me deeply.” Orla, Admin Volunteer

“I love working with Plateful, working alongside the chefs and volunteers who have faced unimaginable challenges to reach and settle in the UK.” Anne, Plateful driver

What Customers Had to Say

2025 was a year of great success for Plateful. It saw catering done for a myriad of events, leaving very fed and satisfied customers. The organisation aims to use the uniting force of food to diffuse its message, and below are some examples of just that.

“I really liked the ethos of Plateful Café: supporting refugee chefs – and it turns out the food is absolutely fabulous too. It was great value for money for our cowork Christmas Party 2025: interesting, tasty and well presented too. Highly recommend!”

Sarah Greene, Co-Founder Buro Cowork

“Everyone had such a lovely time. Seriously, best Christmas party ever. The food was so good, the room was beautiful and the creativity worked perfectly. I’ve sent the Plateful shop website link round and we will definitely spread the word about how brilliant both your organisations are. Thank you, again, for giving us a really special evening”

Anood Al-Samerai, CEO, Community Southwark

Looking Ahead….

The year is starting in full swing, with us running the Warm Space at Blackfriars settlement. Starting from the 7th of January and continuing each Wednesday, we will be preparing soups from all around the world for sixty people.

Jumping to February, our next dinner at Hilly Fields Café will be on 14th of the month to celebrate Valentine’s day. This will feature a Sudanese themed three course menu, with tickets going on sale soon!

These are just snippets into the events Plateful holds, so be sure to regularly check both our Instagram and website to avoid missing out on any exciting updates.

Once again, Happy New Year from us at Plateful! If you thought that 2025 was a brilliant year (which it of course was), just wait to see what we have in store for 2026…

Why Plateful Cafe?

What is Plateful Cafe? Firstly, let’s establish what is Plateful Café? Plateful Café is a social enterprise that connects refugees and local people through a shared love of good food. Our primary objective at Plateful is to establish a physical café where we can serve food lovingly created by our Refugee Chefs. There were a couple of motivations at hand when we decided to set up Plateful Café. First let’s start with the obvious – fantastic food, food is as close as we really get to a universal shared language. In the absence of a common language, food is such an interesting insight into another culture: from the extraordinary precision of sushi to the shared eating experience of Injera, a food popular in Ethiopia. We wanted Plateful to be an insight into the lives and stories of the Refugee chefs who lovingly create the dishes. Whilst much of life is sadly left behind when you are forced to flee your home, knowledge and recipes remain. In this way, food for many of us is so much more than just what’s on your plate. Secondly, the unfortunate reality is that in many charities that involve refugees creating and selling their products, the refugees themselves are detached, or at worst removed, from important decisions and directions the charity takes. At Plateful we are committed to ensuring that every decision we make not only puts the interests of Refugees first but, crucially, is made with Refugees. Finally, we wanted the café and our events leading up to its formation to be a springboard for greater social and cultural cohesion. Today, more than ever, we seem to live in echo chambers. We socialise with the same people, see the same views on LinkedIn, go to the same restaurants. Plateful Café aims to be an antidote to that by creating a space where people from different backgrounds can come together, regardless of social status or background, to share a love of good food. The pay-what-you-can pricing system and the location of the café in a community-owned pub are designed to encourage this kind of interaction. Our Valentine’s Day Dinner on the 15th of February officially marks the start of our journey and it is exciting. We know the journey will most certainly not be a smooth one, but we’ve got a fantastic (growing!) team and we’re all united by a common goal: spreading world flavours by refugee chefs. If you are free, we’d love for you to join us for our dinner later this month: not only to try delicious food but to meet a community of like minded people, all committed to making our society just that bit of a nicer place to be. We hope to see you there.

A Plate Full of Love Plateful Cafes Logo

The idea behind Plateful Cafe is simple. We employ refugees with a talent for cooking and they use their skills to share amazing food with the local community. People who could otherwise wait years to enter the UK workforce find meaningful work more quickly, and Londoners benefit from the amazing culture they bring with them. But as much as the idea is straightforward, putting it across visually is not so much. We wanted to show that Plateful Cafe is the place to come for vibrant, healthy food and that doing so will benefit the community. The design also needed to work across the organisation, from the cafe itself to our catering and our market stalls. That’s a hefty brief. So, we kept it simple. We focused on three core parts of our mission and grew the design from there. The Plate As obvious as it sounds, the plate is central to everything we do. A full plate means you’re fulfilled, safe, and not wanting. It also implies arrival, togetherness, and the ability to provide to others. Our plate is one of variety, filled with food from many sources and cultures. We were inspired by an Arabic design to form the border of our logo. This design will show up all across our brand, from jam labels to banners. The Heart But Plateful Cafe isn’t like other cafes – there’s a lot more to it than the tableware, which provides things for people to consume. Somehow, we needed to show that this food is connected with refugees. That it has a social impact. And that it is a warm place of welcome. How better to show this than with a heart? One that isn’t cutesy or kitsch but that unashamedly sits at the core of everything we do. Just like the cafe itself is refugee-led, the logo revolves around the heart at its centre. The Beetroot A plate and a heart go some way to describing our charity, but they miss one crucial thing – our cooking. This was the most difficult part of the design. Should we focus on the process of preparation, with utensils showing the expertise of our chefs? Or should we focus on the chefs themselves, with a chef’s hat? We tried both options, but they weren’t quite right. In the end, we decided that it’s the food itself that helps our chefs connect with the community and vice versa. The humble beetroot shows that we’re a family kitchen, not something manufactured or artificial. Our food is healthy, handmade, and unique. And the cafe itself helps refugees in south London put down roots and flourish in their new environment. Our first design went through a couple of mutations before we were happy with it. We took inspiration from our very own pickled beetroot for the colour palate, and got help creating a custom font for the typography. But the core elements were there to stay – a full plate, a kind heart, and quality, fresh food that helps the community grow. Final Logo

Celebrating Volunteers Week

Volunteer Week Yesterday (7th), marked the end of Volunteer’s Week. As the name suggests, an annual celebration and recognition of the contribution that millions of people make across the UK through volunteering. To say that volunteers and the volunteering sector, in general underpin our local communities in this country would be an understatement. Volunteers provide a vital role and support a whole host of different activities: from community outreach to those most vulnerable, sport, all the way through to the arts and culture. And how could we get forget food! In a society that, unfortunately, feels increasingly isolating and obsessed on the individual, the continued existence of volunteers are a source of inspiration, encouraging us to think beyond ourselves and instead, into wider communities that we’re a part of. Simply put, we would not have got to where we are without the countless hours of work our volunteers have committed to Plateful Café. From our event staff helping at in-person events, the fundraising team seeking funding to help our charity grow and of course not forgetting the tireless work of our founder, Iolanda Chirico, does in making sure all areas of Plateful Café are moving in the right direction and towards our goal of having a café staffed and run by refugees. For Volunteers’ Week this year, we thought we would share two testimonies from our volunteers who’ve been volunteering with Plateful Café sharing how they got started at the charity and their thoughts on their respective journey and things to come! Testimonial #1 Albert “I started volunteering with Iolanda at what was then the Refugee Café in December 2020. Initially, I was part of the fundraising team, researching for grant applications, but soon switched to helping out on market stalls. This is where I discovered just how good to cause, and the products truly were. All the food was of such high quality, and clearly made with love. As I learned more about the chefs and how the organisation functioned, I knew it was something I wanted to keep on being a part of. Helping refugees find work and put down roots by sharing their cuisine and culture – what’s not to love? I became a regular face at Woolwich Market, and also helped out with other markets and events. I then took on responsibility for the web shop, but talking to people about our food and the people we worked with was still by far my favourite part of volunteering. Since the transition from Refugee Café to Plateful, I have helped with a couple of events – most notably our launch at Goldsmiths. I can’t wait for us to start trading at markets again, and more importantly, for us to finally achieve what we’ve all been working towards: opening a café staffed and run by refugees, where the community can come together around a table laden with delicious food!” Albert, Market Stall Volunteer Testimonial #2 Tejan “I started volunteering, like Albert, at the Refugee Café towards the end of 2021. was working in a job that didn’t feel very fulfilling and when I saw the advert for the Refugee Café and the premise of empowering local refugees through food it immediately felt like something that I believed in and thought was worth caring for. What, therefore, began as helping the charity with their internal communications, grew to helping to lead the marketing effort in what we now know as Plateful Café. I think what I’ve found most inspiring about the journey volunteering within our space is the number of people on the team all united by the belief to want to make our communities better places to be for refugees. To be completely honest, our journey so far has been a lot harder than I expected and, naturally, hasn’t been without its challenges. From issues surrounding cancellations of launches to of course the budgetary constraints that a charity in its infancy are bound to expect! Having said that, however, I’ve relished every minute volunteering at Plateful Café, I’m grateful for Iolanda for giving me the initial opportunity and am incredibly excited about what we achieve and finally sitting down in our café later this summer!” Tejan, Marketing Lead We’re always looking for more volunteers to help with Plateful Café and if you think this sort of thing is for you, why not have a look at our current vacancies!

An end-of-year note from Iolanda

More Articles

Why Plateful Cafe?

A Plate Full of Love Plateful Cafes Logo

Celebrating Volunteers Week