The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A SWEET COMBINATION
The name “New Haven” is a perfect way to describe a place for refugees to find a new home, away from a homeland that has become a war zone or where they fear persecution: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan.
The city of New Haven also would not be the place it is without its biggest, most obvious resident, Yale University.
When the two join forces, the results are delicious.
Those who arrive with almost nothing to their name, sponsored by Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, may not seem to have much in common with the wealth
and privilege that Yale represents — although that perception is not as accurate as it once was. Yale’s students do come from a
wide range of ethnic, national and economic backgrounds.
But if you find yourself indulging in a piece of
baklava at The Juice Box, Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea, or several other places around the city, you’ll be enjoying the fruits of a mutually beneficial relationship between refugee chefs, sponsored by Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, and the Yale students of Havenly Treats, one of the many student-run organizations at Dwight Hall, Yale’s student-run social justice and service organization.
The fellows are Hala Ghali and Faten Natfaji, both from Homs, Syria, who arrived in the United States on the same plane on July 20, 2016. Ghali and her husband have three children, ranging from 4 to 11 years old, and Natfaji and her husband have a 10- and an 11-year-old. Natfaji has worked in a school cafeteria and tried to work as a hairdresser, but said it was too expensive to get a license.
Now they are earning money through their cooking talents, with Yale and New Haven reaping the benefits.
Nour Hussari, a junior biochemistry major who comes from a Syrian family on Staten Island and speaks Arabic, leads Havenly’s chef-development team and assists the two chefs. They chose to focus on baklava and “people really liked it best of all,” he said. Also, it “stored the easiest” and could be made easily.
Hussari spent last summer as a fellow at the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale and his mentors “really recommended to hone in on that one thing,” he said. The chefs are also adept at many Middle Eastern dishes, such as chicken shawarma, kabobs, hummus and stuffed grape leaves.
The students, who launched Havenly out of the Yale Refugee Project at Dwight Hall, have connected chefs to two bakeries, G Café Bakery on Hamilton Street and Katalina’s
cupcakes on Whitney Avenue, as well as to outlets including Willoughby’s locations, the Book Trader Café and The Juice Box on Chapel Street and the newly opened Café X on Whalley Avenue, as well as BYO Café in Kroon Hall, home of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and Evans Hall Café in the Yale School of Management.
Baklava also can be ordered online at havenlytreats.com at $2 a piece or in quantities such as $72 for 40 pieces up to $485 for 500. Delivery is free.
But where the chefs’ baklava really took off was in one of Yale’s lesser-known locations: the butteries in Yale’s residential colleges. Butteries are the places “for hungry students who are starving from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.,” said Ben Weiss, a junior studying mechanical engineering and a co-founder of Havenly. They have names like The Dive (Davenport) or The Morsel (Morse) and specialties such as The Dive’s RJR, which combines buffalo chicken, cheese, bacon, hot sauce and ranch dressing, or the concoctions known as Jaded Christian, David’s Tuxedo and the Jim Stanley at The Morsel (at least according to spoonuniversity.com).
The name buttery comes from either “a storeroom for liquors” (Merriam-Webster) or “a large cellar room under a monastery, in which food and drink were stored for the provisioning of strangers and passing guests” (Wikipedia).
Whatever they were, they are now a perfect location for the two Syrian women to offer their wares.
Working as a Havenly fellow is “very nice,” said Natfaji. “We’re enjoying the work a lot and once we finish this program we’d like to continue working.”
“We’d like to work in something similar to food preparation,” said Ghali. “I’ve found this
work to be much better than other things I’ve done. I worked in housekeeping and I found it to be very, very difficult work.”
“I love it,” Hussari said of working in Havenly. “I get to hang out with amazing Iraqi and Syrian women. They remind me of home in a way and they’re dedicated and joyful people. It’s good to be around that kind of energy.”
He said that seeking the chefs’ “voice and their input in this project and this fellowship was really important.”
Weiss said Hussari “is one of the most fantastic leaders … that I’ve encountered. All the coordinators have a team of students that they’re working with as well.” Other teams include marketing and media, legal, finance and business development.
One of the team members is Mourad Frishkopf, a first-year
student from Edmonton, Alberta, whose mother is Egyptian and whose father is American. “It’s a mutually beneficial relationship,” he said. “The fellows are getting experience. I’m getting Arabicspeaking experience.”
Weiss’ co-founders were Caterina Passoni, now executive director, who graduated in May 2018 and who is a cultural companion at IRIS, and Alessandro Luciano, who has also graduated. Passoni, who couldn’t be reached because she is in Italy on personal business, is “the only paid employee beyond the chefs,” Weiss said.
Passoni had wanted to help her cultural companion, an Iraqi refugee named Nieda Abbas, to find work through her cooking. “Nieda is an incredible chef, just mind-blowing,” Weiss said.
Weiss was originally drawn to food and cooking in middle school and is interested in “creating
connections through food and communities,” he said.
In New Haven, “there was a particular relevance to the refugee crisis, given all … the fantastic work that’s being done by IRIS, Sanctuary Kitchen [a program of CitySeed]” and others, Weiss said. He joined the Yale Refugee Project last spring “mostly out of curiosity” and “it basically just snowballed from there and I became super-involved in the implementation and execution” of Havenly.
“Starting this organization meant getting to know not only Nieda but her family, visiting her home,” eating with the family, Weiss said. He called Abbas “an incredible individual”; she is now head chef and trainer and listed on the website as a one-woman board of stakeholders.
Havenly assists the women because taking their skills “from the home kitchen to the commercial food industry is … a challenge that can be sort of worked through through training and education,” Weiss said.
Havenly takes in about $4,000 a month and “all of the profits from the bakery go directly back to the refugees,” Weiss said. There is a fundraising team that helps support the program’s expenses.
Both G Café Bakery and Katalina’s have donated their baking space. Most of the orders are made on Sunday at G Café; late orders and any that need to be finished are baked on Wednesday evenings at Katalina’s.
Kathy Reigelmann, owner of Katalina’s, said she was happy to offer her kitchen. “My parents were immigrants. They came from Hungary in 1956, so it just came naturally to do it,” she said.
“I just kind of feel I have that in me,” she said. “My father was very generous” in helping Hungarian immigrants and others “who wanted to start a new life.”
In addition to their business, the fellows also attend classes in financial literacy, taxes, computer skills, English as a Second Language, taught by Yale students who are researching those topics, Weiss said.
Weiss said Havenly’s goal is to “establish ourselves in New Haven in such a way that a strong collaboration and connection is created between Yale, New Haven and the refugee population that meaningfully breaks down barriers to employment for female refugees.”
Weiss said he hopes that in the future, the program can grow to support more refugee chefs.
“We see a huge opportunity with Yale as a purchasing institution,” he said. “Should we secure some form of contract with Yale, that would allow us to really, really expand what we do.”