Meet Syed Bashar — Founder of Jaflong Tandoori Catering

Syed's cooking began at home, in a Sylheti family kitchen where spices were ground fresh and nothing came out of a jar. He arrived in London and started where most people in the trade start — at the bottom, in someone else's kitchen, learning the hours before learning the recipes.

The full family and restaurant history — Sylhet, the move to Richmond, the opening of Jaflong Tandoori and the family archive — is told on the restaurant side of the business. This page picks up the second chapter: how that restaurant experience turned into a catering operation.

Syed learned and helped develop the operational side of family-run restaurant businesses: ordering and supplier relationships, prep sequencing, service timing, staffing a busy night, and holding quality when a full room of covers lands at once.

That is the unglamorous half of the trade, and it is the half catering depends on. A recipe is portable; a working kitchen is not. Knowing exactly how a kitchen holds together under pressure is what makes it possible to rebuild one temporarily somewhere else.

Moving food off-site exposes problems a restaurant never has to solve. Rice and breads that are perfect at the pass dry out in a holding tray. Sauces split when they are reheated badly. Service stalls because a marquee has one power point and no run-off. Guests with allergies get an afterthought plate instead of the meal everyone else is eating.

Those recurring failures — not a marketing plan — are what shaped Jaflong's catering. Each one was worked back into how the food is cooked, packed, transported, held and served.

The answers were practical: menus built around dishes that genuinely travel, cook-to-event timing rather than batching days ahead, holding and reheating methods tested against real set-up windows, labelled service so dietary needs are visible at the counter, and a set-up checklist that assumes the venue will provide less than it promised.

Vegan, vegetarian and allergen options are cooked as part of the same menu rather than bolted on, because the alternative was watching guests eat differently from everyone around them.

In 2008 Syed established Jaflong Tandoori in Richmond. The restaurant came first; catering grew out of it, one request at a time — a customer's daughter's wedding, then an office lunch, then a community gathering, then a school summer fair.

Today the catering side is a business in its own right, running buffets, food stalls and plated service for 20 to 500+ guests, with a Food Standards Agency rating of 5 and halal-sourced meat and poultry throughout.

The systems were proved in the least forgiving places: private homes with domestic kitchens, school fields, club halls, offices with no service space, and outdoor fairs where the weather is part of the brief. Regular work runs across Richmond, Ham, Petersham, East Sheen, Mortlake, Barnes, Kew, St Margarets, Twickenham, Whitton, Isleworth, Teddington, Hampton, Hampton Hill, Hampton Wick, Strawberry Hill, Kingston upon Thames, Norbiton, Surbiton and New Malden.

That includes Ham Fair, Hollyfield and Grey Court school events, Richmond Park and Royal Parks gatherings, corporate offices along the river, and a long list of private homes where the same families book year after year.

Not every plate stays in the borough. The family's own account is that Jaflong curries have been carried by customers to Manchester, to Brighton, and on at least one occasion across the Channel to France — packed up after an event because someone wanted to bring the taste home with them.

It is not a delivery service and never has been. It is simply what happens when people find a kitchen they trust and refuse to leave it behind.

Jaflong is a place on the Sylhet border where the river runs clear over stones and the hills start. It is where Syed's family is from, and where his idea of good food was formed — cooked properly, shared widely, never rushed.

Naming a Richmond business after it was a way of keeping the two places in the same sentence.