Khayri Shalyar

Contract catering and cafeteria management for offices, sites, camps and institutions, cooked fresh on a rotating cycle menu, served on schedule.

Khayri Shalyar runs staff dining for organisations that need hundreds of people fed correctly and on time, every day. We manage the menu cycle, the kitchen team, the supply line and the hygiene regime as a single operation.

Menus rotate so the room does not tire of them, dietary requirements are handled as standard rather than as exceptions, and every kitchen we run is held to a documented HACCP regime with recorded temperature, cleaning and traceability checks.

Everything here started with one room.

Shalyar Cafe opened in Erbil in 2009. Khayri Shalyar is what that room became once it had to feed a few hundred people a day instead of a few dozen.

It began the way most of them do: a counter, a samovar, and a handful of tables that were meant to seat strangers and ended up seating the same people every week. Nothing about it was a strategy. What it taught, though, became one, that a room is only as good as what arrives at its back door, and that a supplier who has never worked a service does not understand why that matters.

So the café became the reason for the company rather than a branch of it. Learning to buy well enough to keep one counter honest is what turned into the trading desk. Learning to cook the same thing correctly on the four-hundredth plate as on the fourth is what turned into this division. Nothing about a staff canteen is different in kind from that room, only in how many people are waiting, and how little room there is to be late.

The room itself has not changed much. Three generations still sit at the same table, which was never the plan, and is the part we are proudest of. It is also the standard every cafeteria we run is measured against: not whether the meal was delivered, but whether anybody wanted to stay at the table afterwards.

Call the kitchen

Three networks, one desk. Whichever is reachable where you are will get through.

What the counter serves

Tea from the samovar

Poured into the small waisted glass it belongs in, and refilled without being asked.

Kurdish & Turkish coffee

Ground and cooked to order, served with water and something sweet beside it.

Breakfast, all morning

Eggs, honey, cream, olives, cheeses and hot bread, laid out to be shared rather than portioned.

Pastries & sweets

Baked through the day, which is why the counter looks different at nine and at four.

Grills & hot plates

The short menu a table stays for when a visit turns into an afternoon.

Shisha, from our own line

The same flavour every venue on the map below carries, prepared by the people who trained them.