The Brand That Survived COVID

THE STORY

I found Bassel Shreiqi the way most good things happen — sideways. I posted in an expat group in Kathmandu looking for an Arabic teacher. He responded. We met, hit it off, and ended up trading: I worked on his business, he taught me Arabic. That exchange turned into one of the most interesting projects of my career.
 

Bassel had opened Taza in 2014 — Kathmandu's first and only Syrian restaurant, in Pulchowk, built around the food he grew up with in Aleppo and the life he'd built with his Nepali wife Sangita. The restaurant had real warmth and a loyal expat following, and a Kathmandu Times front-page feature that should have been a launchpad. What it didn't have was a brand architecture that could carry it — in Arabic, in Nepali, across the multiple audiences that needed to find it. We fixed that: new identity, menus rebranded in Arabic and Nepali, a delivery model built around his Syrian sweets, a presence that matched the quality of the food.
 

Then COVID hit. Most restaurants in Kathmandu closed and didn't reopen. Taza almost didn't make it either. But Bassel had an instinct: people couldn't come to the restaurant, but they could still have the baklava. We built a packaged sweets delivery model around that idea — something he could make in a kitchen, package beautifully, and get to people's doorsteps. It worked well enough that in the middle of the pandemic, while other businesses were shutting down, Bassel opened a second location — a kiosk in a mall near the original restaurant. A few years later, a third. Taza now operates three locations. The documentary that was made about his story is still on YouTube, and he still makes the best baklava in Kathmandu.