A family business, in the truest sense

How it started

One gruhapravesham, sixty guests, a borrowed church hall kitchen

Lakshmi Annavarapu grew up in Guntur, in a house where the gongura pachadi was ground on a stone and the avakaya jars were labelled by year like wine. Ravi grew up in Hyderabad, where his parents ran a small function-hall catering house near Begumpet through the eighties and nineties – he spent his school holidays counting laddus into boxes and learning why the biryani handi is never opened early.

They moved to London in 2008. In 2012, a friend’s gruhapravesham needed feeding – sixty guests, a Wembley church hall, a kitchen with two working rings. Lakshmi cooked, Ravi ran service, and by the end of the afternoon three other families had asked for their number. Saffron Sky Events started that evening, at the kitchen table, with a name chosen because the sky over both their cities turns the same colour at dusk.

The first 500-guest pelli came in 2015, at a hall in Harrow, with both of Lakshmi’s sisters flown in to help roll laddus. The Wembley kitchen followed in 2017 – a proper unit on Atlip Road with separate veg and non-veg lines, because that promise was easier to keep with two physical kitchens than with two sets of good intentions.

In 2018 Ravi’s cousin Suresh opened the Jubilee Hills office in Hyderabad. It began as a sourcing operation – pootharekulu from Atreyapuram, silks and brassware for décor – and grew into a full planning desk for NRI families arranging London events from India, and Hyderabad weddings from London.

Twelve hundred events later, the rule has not changed: if we wouldn’t serve it at our own family’s function, it doesn’t leave the kitchen. Lakshmi still hosts every tasting. Ravi still walks every venue. And the avakaya is still made to her grandmother’s proportions, which she will not be sharing.