Ashley Makar and Alawia Bahreldin. Lucy Gellman Photo.
On the last full day of operations at Havenly’s Temple Street cafe, nothing seemed immediately out of the ordinary.
A handful of chefs bustled through the bright kitchen, stopping every so often at the front counter when a customer trickled in. On a couch in the corner, Ashley Makar and Alawia Bahreldin went over the minutiae of getting a learner’s permit in New Haven. At the cafe’s only occupied table, a mom and daughter shared a late afternoon lunch, their voices rising and falling in delight over the table.
It was, for a rare moment, relatively quiet. For Executive Directors Caterina Passoni and Denisse Cruz, it was the end of one chapter, and the beginning of another.
Havenly, known for its flaky baklava, amba-kissed falafel and social justice mission, announced Thursday afternoon in an email that it would be closing its 25 Temple St. cafe to focus more intentionally on its fellowship program and future childcare center on Blake Street. Its menu, which tells over a dozen stories of migration through food, will become a memory: after Friday, July 17, no food or catering options will be available from the organization.
The decision, effective immediately, allows the organization to shift its priorities—and dollars—to areas beyond the culinary arts, a request that has come specifically from the women in the organization's fellowship and apprenticeship programs. It will mark the end of a short but powerful chapter for the organization, during which a brick-and-mortar spot has become a cafe, social justice hub, cultural salon, and educational incubator.
Havenly is currently in the twelfth cohort of its fellowship program, which provides workforce development to immigrant and refugee women from across the globe.
Some members of the Havenly team, photographed last year. Contributed Photo.
When Havenly was founded in 2019, “we were very much based in culinary training,” said Passoni Thursday afternoon, in an interview at the cafe. A few baklava sat unclaimed in the pastry case behind her. “Since then, a lot of women have wanted to branch out into different professions.”
Those include childcare, for which Havenly is building an incubator program set to open at 495 Blake St. by the end of the year, as well as home care, paraprofessional education, and patient navigation. This year, fellowship students and staff “tested a new internship program” with employers, which made the training-to-employment pipeline move faster than it has in previous years.
Meanwhile, it has become impossible to break even on the cafe, Passoni said. By this year, the organization was paying a monthly rent of $3,600, or just over $43,000 annually. With the rising cost of food, the need to equitably compensate staff, and a shrinking pool of reliable grant funding, closing cooking and catering operations meant that more money could go to people, rather than to space. This year, Havenly’s annual budget is $1.5 million.
“It’s [the cafe is] a lot of overhead for a training program that has grown out of that original model,” Passoni said. “I want to emphasize that it’s not Havenly closing. It’s just the cafe.”
A trivia-iftar event in April 2023. Rachel Peet File Photo.
Currently, Havenly has four permanent kitchen staff members who are working with the organization’s partners to find future employment. Passoni said restaurants like Gioia and Roli, as well as senior living homes like Tower One/Tower East and healthcare hubs like Fair Haven Community Health Care have been especially helpful partners in this transition, and for finding work for Havenly’s fellowship graduates more broadly.
“This is a new stage for us and a new focus,” she said. “It’s hard, because we built this place [into what it is]! We painted the walls. We’ve done all the work to make it a home and a community.”
That cafe will always be part of the organization’s history, she added. After Passoni and her then-peer Ben Weiss pitched Havenly Treats in 2018—that was through the Collab New Haven—the organization took off in 2019, first as a culinary incubator that used a series of rented kitchens, and then in its current space at 25 Temple St. in September of 2020.
For almost exactly six years, and through several staff transitions, its mission has remained the same: to connect people, build community connections, and empower women through food. But in that time—and during a period of immense sociopolitical upheaval across the globe—it has also grown and changed shape. In the last fellowship cohort alone, Havenly welcomed women from Sudan, Togo, Ecuador, Syria, Jordan, Senegal, El Savador, Ethiopia, and Jamaica.
It may be a bittersweet transition, Passoni said, but it’s one that will help Havenly ensure financial stability going forward. “We really want to make sure people know that we are doing the work,” she said, adding that the organization will continue to operate out of additional office space that it rents in downtown New Haven.
She added that as once-reliable sources of funding dry up—the federal government, for instance, has drastically changed how and whether it even allocates money in the past year and a half—private and individual donations have become more crucial than ever.
Caterina Passoni. Lucy Gellman Photo.
Bahreldin, who hails from Sudan and has done humanitarian work in Darfur, praised the organization’s work and expanded mission, which she’s seen up close as a member of the twelfth and current fellowship cohort. Two years ago, she came to New Haven after fleeing Civil War in her home country. It was Havenly that stepped up to support her.
“Havenly, she gives me the things I need,” she said as Grants Manager and Community Care Coordinator Ashley Makar jumped in to help with a few Arabic turns of phrase. “Because I came from war, I had some problems, psychological and social, all these problems I carry.”
In Havenly’s fellowship program, from which she will graduate on Friday afternoon, she found a community of other women who understood some of the weight she was carrying, and helped her set it down. Through classes and an internship program, she learned how to find, apply for, and secure a job in a new country.
“They gave me a safe space,” she said. “They gave me confidence to talk, to be free, to raise my voice.”
Bahreldin is working part-time in homecare. Thursday found her on one of the cafe’s plush blue couches, learning about Connecticut driving laws with Makar. While she understands the pivot the organization is making, she said, she’ll miss the cafe. Her favorite item is the Baghdad Bowl—curried chicken, rice, peas, carrots and sliced almonds—because it tastes unlike anything she had growing up. She also loves the falafel, because it reminds her of home.
“It gave me a big opportunity to learn about different people from different communities,” she said.