Food & Drink /
High tea highlights
Family business Dina Foods brings exquisite new flavours to the traditional British afternoon tea menu, offering high-quality Mediterranean flatbreads and sweet confectionery such as its signature baklawa.
The popularity of afternoon tea, with its traditional sandwiches, scones and cakes and pastries, continues to boom all around the UK. Hundreds of venues, large and small, are now offering high tea, and consumers are almost spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing where to go for refreshments.
A few imaginative twists to traditional favourites are what is needed to make a menu stand out from the crowd and catch the customer’s attention. That’s where Dina Foods comes in, the London-based Mediterranean flatbread and confectionery specialist.
The family company can offer delicious nibbles, such as mini cocktail pitta breads and baklawa to jazz up the afternoon tea menu, all prepared using traditional recipes to the highest quality standards.
“Dina Foods bakes its mini artisan pitta breads in all different shapes and sizes for use in canapés and as finger food,” says General Manager Wilda Haddad.
For afternoon tea, cocktail-pittas might be filled with a traditional salmon and cream cheese, or perhaps one of Dina Foods’ best-selling sweet potato falafel, thinly sliced on a bed of its hummous or baba ganoush, or one of the other savoury Mediterranean delights for which Dina Foods is renowned.
On the next tier up of the afternoon tea tray, Dina Foods’ baklawa, filo delights and other sweet finger foods will make sure that afternoon tea ends on a high note.
“Sweet and crunchy baklawa which are traditionally offered to friends and family at times of celebration, are becoming more and more popular with the coffee shop and afternoon tea market,” Wilda says.
Dina Foods prides itself in being the leading supplier of baklawa in the UK, and on never having compromised on the quality of these celebratory sweetmeats. Dina’s handmade baklawa is created with layers of filo pastry, sandwiched with crushed nuts, ghee, spices and honey syrup. They come in any number of varieties, for example enrobed in chocolate or layered with apricots, cranberries or mint. The pieces come in different sizes, from cocktail portions of 20g up to restaurant dessert portions of 120g.
Wilda says that baklawa can be enjoyed not just at afternoon tea, but alongside a morning coffee or at any time of day. Coffee shops might sell little packs of two or three baklawas for customers to savour with their drink or grab and go.
She says: “Traditionally baklawa was served to celebrate happy times, such as when family and friends visit to celebrate the birth of a new baby. This is an indulgent product which should be made with the finest ingredients to mark the special occasion. We have never compromised on quality with our confectionery products or our breads or our savouries, the reputation of Dina Foods over the years has always been built on quality first.”
Wilda recently became the second generation of the Haddads in the business, having joined her father and uncles’ company earlier this year as general manager, although she has of course been steeped in the family business since her earliest childhood.
The Haddad brothers first came to the UK in the 1970s, setting up one of the first Lebanese restaurants in the country, Fakhreldine in London’s Mayfair in the 1980s. The brothers were Fadi Haddad, Samir Haddad, and Wilda’s father Suheil Haddad, now managing director of Dina Foods. The fourth brother, the highly talented chef Amin Haddad, is now sadly deceased.
The brothers’ original 220 cover Fakhreldine soon became a destination restaurant in London, with queues for tables every night. A second site was then opened, the seafood-specialist venue Lucullus. It was from here that Dina Foods was born in 1991, originally launching in Hackney, before moving to the Park Royal area in North West London twenty years ago, when it outgrew the original site.
From the start the company was the leading supplier of Mediterranean flatbreads in the UK. In fact, Dina Foods launched the UK’s first flatbread with a high street retailer two decades ago. Dina Foods has grown and grown since then and now has a multi-million pound turnover and employs some 160 people.
Breads are baked around the clock and delivered daily to restaurants, cafés and other foodservice businesses, as well as local and national retailers, alongside confectionery and savoury items. The scale may have changed, but this family business still takes the same approach to business as it always has done.
Making a sweet impression on customers by offering the finest quality delicacies is the priority. More than that it is also a matter of pride.
