This October with Plateful Cafe! (London Catering Service)

Plateful Cafe needs a home…

As some of our readers may remember, Plateful Café was at Parkside from June 2023 to April 2024 –  first as a hospitality training space for our refugees, and then as a vibrant community café serving a Syrian-inspired menu. For many of our chefs, Parkside was an extremely important space that allowed them to learn and develop crucial skills in the hospitality sector. When our café closed in April after an eight-month pilot, its loss was deeply felt by our team and the community, who had come to see it as a welcoming space to gather and share food.

Since then, we’ve continued our mission through pop-ups and community dinners, but operating without a dedicated kitchen has brought real challenges. Preparing food off-site and transporting it to various venues limits the number of chefs we can train and employ, and makes it harder to grow our impact. Despite these obstacles, our commitment to creating opportunities for refugees remains unwavering, and our adaptability has led us to explore new income-generating ventures like catering and private dining experiences!

Now, we’re determined to find a permanent home once again that can house our chefs, support our day-to-day operations, and serve as a true community hub. We’re currently in talks with potential partners, including Blackfriars Settlement and Appleby Blueand are definitely hopeful of what these partnerships can bring!

Thank you for joining us on this journey!

What’s been on October?

September was definitely an eventful month! Some of our highlights include the pop-up stall at the Family Mini Festival in Catford and a three-course lunch at Spitafield Farm to celebrate the Power of Food Festival. Both were lovely events where we got to interact with the community.

October, so far, has been full of flavour! We kicked off the month with a sold-out Syrian Feast at Hilly Fields Café – a beautiful evening of food, culture, and connection. Following its success, we’re thrilled to share that we plan to host regular dinners there in the future (more information to come soon!)

On the 17th, we’ll be welcoming guests to our very first Sudanese meal, featuring live music from Lucie Coholt, who will be performing her latest single, and a menu that celebrates the rich, diverse flavours of Sudanese cuisine.

If you missed out on the above, don’t worry! Our regular pop-ups at SET Social and our Wednesday residency at Hill Station Café continue into the second half of the month.

Thank you to everyone who’s joined us and supported these gatherings!

Want to bring Plateful Cafe to your kitchen?

You may have noticed our chefs have been sharing their favourite recipes on Instagram lately –  and what a treat this is!

Most recently, we have shared Ghormeh Sabzi (Herb and Kidney bean stew), a traditional Persian recipe that is a bowl of warmth and flavour.  If you love to try new and exciting flavours, this one is for you.

For more recipes, follow our Instagram!

Have a special event coming up?

Choose Plateful for your next event and make a difference! We cater for any occasion from weddings to corporate events, our diverse menu offers global flavours, and includes three-course meals and delicious canapes. We would love to celebrate your special event with you! For enquiries, please click the link below.

Enquire here:https: //docs.google.com/forms/u/0/d/e/1FAIpQLSdi463WZxcSLzU0ciYb8HwNtW0DGw1J_WxMAXXSRcPSQy4jgg/viewform?pli=1&authuser=0

 

More Articles

Iolanda founder of Plateful Cafe

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.

Plateful Cafe Celebrating Volunteers

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!