How Jaffna Kitchen Started During a Pandemic and What We've Built Since

Most businesses wait for the right moment. We started in the worst possible one.

COVID lockdown, 2020. No events. No gatherings. No reason to think a catering business would work. But the idea had been there longer than the pandemic. The feeling that nobody around us was making Sri Lankan food the way it deserved to be made. Fresh. Proper. Rooted in the recipes we'd grown up with. So we started a dark kitchen.

What is a dark kitchen?

A dark kitchen is a professional kitchen that operates delivery-only, no restaurant front, no dine-in, just food cooked and sent out. During lockdown, it was one of the only ways to run a food business. We built a menu around the food we knew best: Jaffna-style curries, mutton rolls, rice and curry spreads. Cooked fresh every day. Delivered to people who were stuck at home and, frankly, tired of cooking the same things.

What happened next

Word spread the way it does when the food is genuinely good. People ordered once, then ordered again. They told someone. That person ordered. We started getting requests for family events as restrictions lifted, small gatherings at first, then bigger ones.

The catering side grew from there. Events, then corporate work, then weddings. The live cooking stations came later, once we had the events infrastructure in place. They've become one of the things we're most known for.

Where we are now

Over 100 events. Weddings, corporate events, private celebrations, festival catering across London and the UK. A team that knows how to run a full-service event from first conversation to last plate cleared.

We're still cooking the same food we started with. The same recipes. The same care. The business has grown but the food hasn't changed. Because why would it?