A Dish Nobody Could Picture Was a Dish Nobody Ordered.
PAKKA LOCAL - 2025
Pakka Local built a Hyderabadi and Mughlai kitchen in Surrey worth ordering for — but its most ambitious dish, a Mandi built to serve fifteen, wasn't landing on tables. Aflak was brought in to build the visual library that would make it, and the rest of the menu, legible at a glance.
CLIENT
Pakka Local Indian Cuisine
SCOPE
Restaurant Photography · Cinematic B-Roll · Brand Visual Library
YEAR
2025 / 2026
DIVISION
Aflak Media
What we built, and why it mattered.
01 - OVERVIEW
Pakka Local Indian Cuisine — Hyderabadi, Mughlai & South Indian dining, Surrey, BC
CLIENT
TIMELINE
2 weeks pre-production · 2-day on-site capture · 7-day photo turnaround
Restaurant Photography · Cinematic B-Roll · Custom Color Grading (LUT) · Digital Press Kit
SERVICES APPLIED
2 crew on the ground (Executive Producer/Photography, Creative Director/Cinematography), 1 location — Surrey, BC
TEAM ON GROUND
Pakka Local opened in Surrey in 2025 with a specific ambition — bring Hyderabadi, Mughlai, and South Indian cooking to the city with a level of craft and presentation that hadn't been done there before, halal-certified and self-described as "royal," built around dishes most Surrey diners had never seen plated the way Pakka Local plates them. Owner Phani Komi had followed Aflak's work for two years, from a BC halal festival to a wedding shoot, before reaching out directly to build Pakka Local's visual foundation from the ground up.
The brief was a full visual library, not a single shoot: signature dishes, the kitchen in motion, the dining room, the patio, and the exterior, captured in a system built for reuse across the website, Google Business, social, and print. What made it distinctive was the constraint Phani set early — no stock, no staged emptiness, nothing that looked shot for the sake of being shot. Every frame had to carry the same texture and rhythm as the restaurant on a real Wednesday night. That constraint is where the harder problem lived.
THE CHALLENGE
The surface request was photography and video. The real problem was legibility. Pakka Local's most ambitious dish — a Baahubali Mandi built to feed fifteen, carried to the table by two staff — was already on the menu and already on Instagram, but a single existing clip, shot on a phone, hadn't done it justice. Guests couldn't picture the scale of it, the ritual of it, or who it was for, and a dish nobody can picture is a dish nobody orders with confidence. Layered on top of that: Pakka Local was only months into its 2025 launch, with a digital footprint still forming — modest review volume, a site with unfinished placeholder pages, and no third-party validation to lean on yet. The visual library had to do double duty: make the food make sense at a glance, and make a new restaurant read as an established one.
How we moved from brief to delivery.
02 - THE APPROACH
A pre-production call walked the full menu hierarchy dish by dish — the Mandi platings for two, five, and fifteen; the 365-day Haleem that takes ten hours to prepare; the Hakka-style tossed appetizers; the fusion biryanis with mushroom, kofta, and paneer variations; the street-style fried rice and noodles. From that conversation, Aflak built separate photography and videography shot lists, sequenced by how the kitchen actually moves — interiors first while the room was still empty, then food station by station, then service — and locked the creative direction Phani asked for directly: natural light over commercial polish, staff filling empty seats so nothing read as staged, and consent-first coverage of any guests in frame.
01
ROOT · PRE-PRODUCTION
Production ran across two days by design. Day one began at 7 a.m., an hour before the kitchen crew arrived, to capture the dining room and detail shots while the room was still empty — then moved through the kitchen station by station as the team prepared the full menu for camera: the wok toss on the appetizer line, the Mandi trays for two, five, and fifteen, the biryani lift, the Haleem ladle, tandoor skewers, the bar build. Day two was pushed to a clear-sky window for the exterior, patio, and a drone orbit to show the scale of the space. Across both days, the two-person photo and cinema team worked 80 individual shot setups against the locked list, with real diners seated in frame throughout — no closures, no emptied rooms.
02
BLOOM · PRODUCTION
Post-production applied Aflak's custom LUT — a warm-gold, neutral-black grade matched to Pakka Local's own brand palette — across the edited photo set, with raw files, video, and a CSV shot index delivered alongside for the client's in-house marketing team to work from directly. In line with what Phani asked for in pre-production, the video was delivered unedited: colour-graded, natural sound intact, cut into 5–15 second clips but not assembled into a produced sequence, so the footage kept the unfiltered feel he'd been chasing rather than reading as an ad. Edited photography was delivered within a week of the shoot.
03
HARVEST · POST-PRODUCTION
Beyond the raw library, Aflak curated and hosted a standalone digital press kit — the Pakka Local LookBook — pulling the strongest frames into an editorial sequence built for media and collaborators rather than for feed posting. It's positioned for cultural coverage and brand features where atmosphere and authenticity matter more than a promotional pitch, giving Pakka Local a press-ready asset it didn't have before this project.
04
PAKKA LOCAL LOOKBOOK
What the work produced, in numbers.
03 - THE RESULTS
80+
Individual shot setups captured across photo + cinema
7-Day
Photo delivery turnaround from shoot to client
4.8★
Google rating across 5,112 reviews
1,100+
Social Media Follower Base
Everything you've captured has had life in it — some story, not just pictures. It's not just clicking a picture or putting a video together; it has to have soul, and that's stuck with me for two years. That's why I don't want any stock footage for Pakka Local — I want the same feel of what we're actually preparing, the food we want to showcase."
Phani Komi · Owner · Pakka Local Indian Cuisine
What was produced.
04 - DELIVERABLES
CINEMATIC B-Roll (RAW)
FILM
5–15 second 4K clips across food prep, plating, service, and ambience — 16:9 and 9:16, colour-graded but uncut, delivered with natural sound for the client's own edit.
PHOTOGRAPHY (EDITED)
PHOTO
Retouched stills of signature dishes, interiors, and atmosphere in 3:4 and 1:1, tier-based quantities, high-resolution (300 DPI) for web and print.
PHOTOGRAPHY (RAW) & METADATA INDEX
ARCHIVE
Full raw file set delivered organized by dish, angle, and format, indexed via CSV shot map for future campaign use.
CUSTOM COLOR REFERENCE
COLOR
Warm-gold, neutral-black .cube file matched to Pakka Local's brand palette, plus a JPEG reference, for consistent grading across future in-house content.
PAKKA LOCAL LOOKBOOK
CUSTOM
A curated, Aflak-hosted digital press kit for editorial and media use — the restaurant's first press-ready visual asset.
PLANT THE FIRST SEED
Let’s build yours
If your story deserves this kind of treatment, start with a 30-minute call. No deck required — bring the question, we'll bring the map.