The Facebook Blog

Food is an important part of every culture, including the culture inside of our company. Since our early days, we've offered free meals for the people that work at Facebook because it creates camaraderie among the diverse group of people working here and it lets us focus more of our time on building a better service.

As part of our food traditions, we observe cultural and religious holidays from around the world at CafeX, the name of our main cafeteria and kitchen in our headquarters office. As a global company with employees hailing from around... the world, we try to acknowledge and take part in as many of their diverse cultural celebrations as we can.

A few weeks ago, one of our engineers, Ali Heydari, approached me with the idea to host a Nowruz feast at Facebook. Nowruz, literally meaning "New Day," is an ancient Iranian festival observed by more than 300 million people and as a national holiday in 11 nations. It celebrates the start of the Iranian New Year, which was on March 20 this year.

The culinary team and I agreed to create a special menu for this holiday, but we first needed to research the food we would be preparing. When cooking traditional food, we like to be as authentic as possible. We asked a few of our employees of Iranian descent for their help with the feast and the table decorations.

Navid Mansourian from IT and Niloofar Nafici from our security team took members of our culinary team to a local Iranian restaurant Rose International Market, in Mountain View, Calif., so we could sample many of the dishes that would be on the menu.

Niloofar volunteered to set up the traditional Nowruz table, and Navid helped to create the menu and to work in the kitchen to ensure the food tasted authentic. Our menu included: lavash bread, mahi sefeed (white fish), kabab chenjeh (lamb kebab), jooje kabab (chicken kebab), borani esfenaaj (spinach and yogurt) and salad-e shirazi (tomato-cucumber salad).

Pedram Keyani from our site integrity team documented the preparations in this video:



This was the first time that we celebrated Nowruz at Facebook, but we have celebrated several other holidays and festivals. These include Thanksgiving, Christmas and Passover, as well as Holi, Durga Puja, Chinese New Year's and most recently, St. Patrick's Day.

Do you have a favorite holiday or festival meal from your culture that we haven't yet celebrated? Let us know by sharing it in comments. We'll choose our favorite and then prepare a special menu to honor it. We'll share the meal with you in future posts on the Facebook Page, so become a fan to get future updates.


Josef, Facebook's culinary overlord, is looking forward to cooking for your favorite holiday.