ISSO opens its first int’l corporate location in London’s Canary Wharf

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

Breaking the historical mold of global hospitality expansion, homegrown culinary inspiration 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 center, Canary Wharf.

Operating under its global digital banner, ISSO - Prawn Crazy, the rollout marks a monumentalshift for the island’s economy. 

While London’s food scene has recently welcomed Sri Lankan flavour 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-bredcorporate restaurant framework from the streets of Colombo to expand natively into the Westernworld.

What began as a revolutionary, 16-seat quick-service restaurant in central Colombo has matured into a highly optimized, scalable hospitality engine. The Canary Wharf restaurant features aboasting 90-seater indoor capacity, masterfully designed to handle the extreme volume and tighttime 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 utilizing 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 areexecuted with extreme consistency and blistering speed.

“We chose Canary Wharf for our Western debut because it is the ultimate high-intensity stage to prove the scalability of our framework,” said Apinash Sivagumaaran, Founder & CEO of ISSO Group. “But let’s be entirely clear: we are not just opening restaurants. We are building a highlysophisticated, plug-and-play model for seamless cross-border expansion. For decades, Sri Lankahas 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 equatorialgeography and unpolluted coastal mangroves, these prawns possess a natural crisp snap, firmtexture, and a delicate sweetness that exposes mass-scale, pond-farmed global varieties asflavorless substitutes.

To support this, ISSO - Prawn Crazy has built a completely transparent, vertically integrated coldchain 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 localcoastal communities.

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

By shifting away from standard hospitality real estate toward a plug-and-play operational framework, ISSO - Prawn Crazy is set to aggressively scalethis beachhead into a dense “London Cluster” before marching into continental Europe.