Plateful Cafe – Blog and News

There is a question that many Syrians living abroad have become tired of hearing: “Why haven’t you gone back to Syria? The dictator is gone. The country is liberated. What are you waiting for?” The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in December 2024 was a historic moment. But ending a government does not erase 14 years of war, destruction, displacement

When I became Training Manager at Plateful Café, I brought almost twenty years of hospitality experience with me. I understood kitchens, service and the pressures of the industry, but this role taught me to look at hospitality in a completely different way. It showed me that a kitchen can be more than a workplace: it can be a place where

Plateful Cafe was recently featured in UnFeatured Anthony Bourdain once declared the dinner table The Great Equalizer: a space where division melts into unity over aromas and flavours that speak to us in a tongue that the mind doesn’t need to understand. Iolanda echoed him. “When you sit down and eat together, you forget where you’re coming from and just

Building Skills, Confidence and Community Through Food Securing a commercial kitchen at Blackfriars Settlement has enabled Plateful Café to relaunch its hospitality training programme and continue supporting refugees and people seeking asylum on their journey towards employment, enterprise and social inclusion. Our Introduction to Working in Hospitality programme ran from 13 April to 30 June 2026, with five participants from