This Christmas with Plateful Cafe!

The Christmas with Plateful Cafe!

Dear Readers,

As we reach the final chapter of the year, the Plateful Cafe team is filled with gratitude and festive excitement!

With new experiences on the horizon for 2026, continued growth in our pop-ups and private catering, and more beneficiaries stepping into employment, there is so much to be hopeful for in the year to come.

In this edition, you’ll find a round-up of what we’ll be offering in December, details of our upcoming plans for next year, and reflections on the impact your support has made.

There’s plenty to unwrap. Happy reading, and warm wishes for a peaceful, joyful Christmas season!

Thank you for an amazing year!

2025 has been a truly amazing year for Plateful Café, and we would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has supported, volunteered, eaten with us, or shared our mission.

Together, we created 664 hours of paid work for refugees and delivered £7,328 in fair wages, ensuring that every dish served contributed directly to rebuilding lives. This growth also allowed us to welcome new talent into our kitchen, including chefs like Jafar Adam from Sudan, whose passion and skill have already made an incredible impact on our team.

One of the biggest highlights of the year has been the rise of our private catering service. What began as a few small events has now blossomed into a thriving stream to Plateful Café, with bookings spanning from weddings to corporate gatherings. We’ve received countless generous reviews praising the menus we prepare, and the demand continues to grow. Your trust in us has turned private catering into one of our strongest pathways for creating sustainable work opportunities!

Most importantly, we’ve seen our cooks’ confidence and careers flourish. This year, two more cooks moved into part-time employment thanks to the experience they gained with us. Sana now works three days a week as a cook in a local nursery, and Jafar has secured part-time work as a kitchen porter in a nearby restaurant. Their achievements fill us with immense pride!

Thank you for continuing to support us!

 

Click this link to read more Plateful Cafe wishes you a lovely Christmas period!

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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!