ISSO - Prawn Crazy makes history as first born-and-bred Sri Lankan restaurant to open in London

Founder/CEO Apinash Sivagumaaran (left) and Executive Chef Karan Kashyap

Breaking the historical mold of global hospitality expansion, homegrown culinary powerhouse ISSO has officially established a direct corporate beachhead in the United Kingdom, opening its flagship international location at 25 Cabot Square in the heart of London’s high-velocity financial centre, Canary Wharf.

Operating under its global digital banner, ISSO - Prawn Crazy, the rollout marks a monumental shift for the island’s economy. While London’s food scene has recently welcomed Sri Lankan flavor profiles, those concepts have historically been diaspora-led, UK-born enterprises. ISSO - Prawn Crazy shatters this status quo, arriving as the first-ever authentic, born-and-bred corporate restaurant framework from the streets of Colombo to expand natively into the Western world.

What began as a revolutionary, 16-seat quick-service restaurant in central Colombo has matured into a highly optimised, scalable hospitality engine. The Canary Wharf restaurant features a boasting 90-seater indoor capacity, masterfully designed to handle the extreme volume and tight time constraints of the European banking capital’s elite corporate lunch and dinner rushes.

Central to the brand’s disruptive edge is its direct defiance of the traditional, slow, manually dependent restaurant model. ISSO - Prawn Crazy is exporting true Sri Lankan operational and tech innovation by utilising advanced kitchen robotics on its production line. By integrating automation like Robot Woks, the brand has mathematically decoupled premium culinary execution from human error and labor constraints; ensuring that complex island dishes are executed with extreme consistency and blistering speed.

ISSO Group Founder & CEO Apinash Sivagumaaran said: “We chose Canary Wharf for our Western debut because it is the ultimate high-intensity stage to prove the scalability of our framework. But let’s be entirely clear: we are not just opening restaurants. We are building a highly sophisticated, plug-and-play model for seamless cross-border expansion. For decades, Sri Lanka has been trapped in the commodity cycle, exporting raw goods under bulk white labels while foreign middlemen capture the true margins. ISSO - Prawn Crazy is flipping the script. We are exporting a fully branded, technologically advanced, vertically integrated consumer ecosystem directly to the center of global commerce.”

At the absolute core of the menu is what Sivagumaaran proudly terms “The Wagyu of the Sea”—export-grade, wild sea-caught Sri Lankan prawns. Thanks to the island’s unique equatorial geography and unpolluted coastal mangroves, these prawns possess a natural crisp snap, firm texture, and a delicate sweetness that exposes mass-scale, pond-farmed global varieties as flavorless substitutes.

To support this, ISSO - Prawn Crazy has built a completely transparent, vertically integrated cold chain in exclusive partnership with Janaka Mayakaduwage at Alpex Marine. Sourcing directly from over 150 small-boat artisanal day fishermen across Jaffna and Mannar, the catch is Individually Quick Frozen (IQF) to an ultra-low -36°C within 8 hours of harvest, bypassing European wholesale middlemen entirely and pumping financial victory straight back into local coastal communities.

To guarantee flawless operational execution during its high-profile launch phase, ISSO – Prawn Crazy has engineered a hyper-focused, limited-edition Preview Menu. Led by Head Chef Karan Kashyap - formally trained at the elite IHM Pusa and polished in renowned London establishments including the Michelin-regarded Veeraswamy, Roti Chai, and Chai Ki - the opening selection balances iconic street-fusion and regional mastery.

The culinary journey is paired with a sophisticated, high-margin liquid program featuring imported premium Lion Beer and Lion Stout straight from the island, alongside a curated collection of fine European wines, Champagnes, and premium spirits.