As students settled into the new school year and an autumn breeze rustled through New Haven, mid-September brought an orange dove, mid-flight with a fork and knife in its beak, to 25 Temple Street. Sunlight pooling onto its tangerine bar stools and white-washed brick walls, Havenly Treats—a new Middle Eastern restaurant—was open for business.
The building itself is calm, if not austere. Arabic and Spanish conversations in the kitchen mix with Iraqi music. The aroma of Arab coffee and falafel lingers in the air. For many of its guests and employees, Havenly feels like home.
“We are a mezze bar on a mission,” reads a chalkboard hanging on the wall next to the front counter. The other end of the restaurant offers clarification: above a black-and-white painting of a woman mixing ingredients in a bowl are the words “we build economic and political power with refugee women” in English, Spanish, and Arabic. The space is home to an unlikely bunch of superheroes: some sip Iraqi cardamom tea, others blast “Despacito” from behind the counter, and many of them have chosen to don a hijab in place of the traditional cape.
To passersby, Havenly Treats may seem like a quick lunch stop to grab some hummus or stuffed grape leaves. But the restaurant’s real stories lie beyond their culinary offerings. From a small, humble partnership between a student and a chef, the restaurant has grown into an enterprising community partnership of refugee women who prepare and sell traditional Arab dishes.
Built on an understanding that everyone brings something to the table and can learn from one another, the restaurant is a testament to the power of community-building. It’s the intertwining of so many people and stories—bridging Yale and New Haven, students and refugees, cuisine and education—that makes Havenly Treats unique.
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بقلاوة // Baklava
Nieda al-Abbas, Havenly’s Head Chef, had long dreamt of opening a restaurant. Now, she is in the kitchen, rolling out sheets of phyllo dough, while directing the other women as they prepare tabbouleh and tzatziki salad.
al-Abbas, a refugee from Iraq, speaks Arabic to the Sudanese women in the kitchen, and communicates with brief English phrases and gestures with her Latin American co-workers.
Though the women in the kitchen are strangers to one another’s languages, they work with each other to serve beautiful, fragrant food—from mujaddarah, a hearty rice and lentil dish, to mezze plates and after-dinner snacks.
Mornings in the kitchen begin with al-Abbas lighting fragrant incense and listening to melodious Quran recitations. “There’s a common saying in Iraq,” she explained in an interview with The Politic. “Aleafiya darajat”—blessings and success come step by step. “We climb one step at a time. I believe I can make what I dream come true. I love life…. I love the world.”
al-Abbas’s daily optimism infuses the kitchen with warmth. She encourages the team to start the day with a positive mindset, and credits her own morning routine with helping her channel gratitude into her work daily.
Fifteen years ago, al-Abbas and her family were lighting incense and listening to the Quran oceans away, back home in Baghdad. But when the U.S. military’s occupation in their hometown during the Iraq War tore apart her hometown, she, her husband, and their six children fled to Syria, where they lived for seven years, and then onto Turkey for another four years—years filled with fear, uncertainty, and instability. In 2014, she and her family were finally able to claim refugee status in America.
“The journey was hard,” al-Abbas recalled. “I was scared, but I couldn’t tell my husband or kids. I had to be the strong one, the hero.” Her family settled into New Haven, but it was very difficult for them to adjust to life in America and find employment, especially because al-Abbas and her family didn’t speak English.
While al-Abbas was settling in New Haven, Caterina Passoni ’18, then a Yale sophomore, was getting involved with the Yale Refugee Project (now the Migration Alliance at Yale). As part of Integrated Refugee and Immigration Service (IRIS)’s Cultural Companions program, which helps refugees acclimate to their new environments, she was paired with al-Abbas’s daughter, Maryam. Each weekend, Passoni would visit their home, working with Maryam on her English homework and helping the family adjust to the city.
While the two worked, al-Abbas cooked them Iraqi dishes. “We Arabs are hospitable,” al-Abbas explained. “We like to serve a lot of food and sweets. So when [Passoni] came over, I would make platters of foods and sweets for her to try, and she loved the dishes.”
As Passoni’s Arabic skills progressed, she and al-Abbas were able to communicate more, and the two soon became close friends. “I was a college student missing home, and she made amazing food,” Passoni said. “I always say she’s like my mom away from my home.” Her weekend visits stretched into the next three years.
In 2018, while Passoni was volunteering with IRIS, another Yale student, Ben Weiss ’19, suggested that they help refugees like al-Abbas sell their food in the residential college Butteries. al-Abbas was immediately on board.
After that, their project “took on a life of its own,” Passoni said.
“I was supposed to leave [New Haven] after graduation,” Passoni explained, but two years and a $15,000 Tsai CITY grant later, Passoni and al-Abbas are still in New Haven, working on Havenly together.
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Kleicha // كليچة
In her early conversations with al-Abbas about Havenly, Passoni said that they often exchanged recipe ideas and discussed restaurant service, but rarely did the two speak seriously about Havenly’s business model.
Passoni was in for a rude awakening when she connected with Micalea Blei of The Moth, a storytelling podcast, who was hired to help with Havenly’s marketing strategy. “I went in, told her our story, and she was like, ‘This is trash,’” Passoni recalled.
Passoni remembers Blei saying, “When you talk about [al-Abbas] now, you talk about her as a partner, but when you pitch Havenly you don’t talk about that as a partnership,” Passoni said. “That’s when it clicked, and I was like, ‘[My behavior] is white saviorism at its core.’”
al-Abbas and Passoni envisioned Havenly Treats as a for-profit food business led by al-Abbas that would employ as many women as possible. But she realized that the challenge faced by many refugee women wasn’t a lack of workplaces. Rather, the barrier was that they couldn’t gain access to workplaces due to language and educational barriers. In response to this problem, Havenly began to identify as a program training refugee women housed in a food-powered solution.
After a team of students conducted research on the factors that affect refugee integration, Havenly was able to debut its core fellowship program for a select number of refugee women who were living in New Haven. The fellowship provided these women with a six-month paid culinary work experience; weekly classes; in political advocacy, computer skills, and English as a second language (ESL); and individualized support in searching for and applying to long term employment.
As Havenly began rolling out their fellowship program, the popularity of al-Abbas’s’s baklava increased exponentially at Yale. The small Havenly team scrambled to fill and deliver orders.
In the midst of Havenly’s growth during the 2018 and 2019 school years, another partnership was born. Camila Güiza-Chavez ’19 was a senior finishing up her Ethnicity, Race and Migration degree. It was March, and she hadn’t finalized her plans for after graduation, but she did know she wanted to work in New Haven.
Passoni, who had already heard about Güiza-Chavez’s work organizing on behalf of undocumented immigrants, approached her on Cross Campus and asked her to dinner. By the end, Güiza-Chavez was in love with the vision for Havenly that Passoni had laid out and was ready to join her in co-executing and co-directing the fellowship. Three months after graduating, she came back to New Haven full-time and jumped onboard as the fellowship program’s Community Outreach Director.
Around the time that Güiza-Chavez joined, Malak Nasr ’19, a fluent Arabic speaker raised in Cairo, also joined. Together, the new team committed to center an “equal, meaningful, and productive” partnership at the organization’s center.
“That’s when the vision changed from just helping people access jobs in the food business to building something that is actually led by refugee women and their priorities.” Passoni explained.“How do we use this space that we’re creating together to be one that’s really powerful and that amplifies the voices of this community?”
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The Mezze // المزة
Isolation—due to language, cultural, and physical barriers—is the greatest challenge that refugees face from their first day in the U.S. Adult refugees don’t go to school, they often arrive unemployed, and it can be incredibly difficult to find communities of shared language, religion, and background in new, foreign cities. Havenly endeavors to provide the space and resources for refugee women to create those communities themselves.
“We are trying to create multi-racial alliances and cross-racial alliances,” explained Passoni. “The community we are creating is being intentionally created across Arab refugees… Sudanese immigrants… now Latinx immigrants.”
Havenly’s current fellowship cohort is made up of six women, and for the first time, the group includes Spanish-speaking women as well. The women have already grown to be friends, sharing their struggles and stories with each other as they work in the cozy kitchen, finding that many of their experiences are similar.
al-Abbas balances being a friend with the fellows and guiding them as a mentor, building strong relationships within the Havenly fellowship that serve as a support network.
“They see me as a big sister,” she said. “Havenly is a family.”
According to Passoni, the support that the fellows and staff provide each other “goes both ways. I have received so much support from the women in this program. I will come to Havenly crying and they will make me dinner.”
Passoni has noticed that most relationship-building moments happen spontaneously and organically. After shifts, the women will practice their digital literacy lessons on the computer, supporting and encouraging each other. On her days off, one of the fellows still takes the time to stop by with her children just to say ‘Hi’.
The tight-knit women have also bonded with other members of the community outside of Havenly. When Havenly shared a kitchen in Wooster Square with the bakery Whole German Breads, the employees of the bakery spoke Spanish and listened to Spanish songs in the kitchen. Initially, al-Abbas had reservations about the music selections, but now, Passoni says that al-Abbas always plays “Despacito” on the kitchen speakers.
Since establishing its own physical space downtown, building the Havenly community feels more natural and achievable than it was initially. al-Abbas recalls the feeling of being able to open the door into the restaurant that she dreamed about for so long.
“It was my dream, and it became true,” she said with pride. “I told [Passoni], ‘This is my key! I can open and close the door with my hand!’ It’s something really special for us.”
The New Haven community rallied around Havenly as it undertook intense cleaning and renovation of the space during summer 2020, redesigning a space which previously served as the seafood restaurant and bar, Mr. Crab.
Over the summer, Havenly partnered with Emerge, a New Haven nonprofit that supports formerly incarcerated people by helping them find jobs in construction, to help with renovations and advise the Havenly team on how to modify the existing space to fit their needs. MakeHaven, a New Haven non-profit center for innovative entrepreneur projects, helped with the painting, signs, and decorative stickers. Miguel Angel Mendoza, an artist who immigrated from Oaxaca, Mexico to New Haven 20 years ago, is planning to paint a mural on Havenly’s front window.
By mid-September, after months of work, Havenly had its grand opening, and the space felt like home.
“It’s such a game changer to be able to have our own place where the women can come and feel some sense of ownership,” said Güiza-Chavez. “There’s something really beautiful and human about seeing something that you create, and for us that’s the food we sell—cooking it here, selling it here, watching people enjoy it here.”
Beyond their culinary offerings, though, Güiza-Chavez imagines Havenly’s new physical location as a “whole experience in one place.”
“There’s a lot of potential…to make the experience an engaging one for customers that come in,” she continued, hoping that patrons can “learn about and engage with our mission in different ways.”
And although the pandemic has limited what Havenly can do with the space, Passoni, Güiza-Chavez, and al-Abbas have big dreams. They hope to open the building’s classrooms and conference rooms to local organizing and advocacy groups. The bookshelf in the corner will be transformed into a learning corner, complete with an armchair and a constant exchange of books as people borrow and share knowledge. On weekends, Havenly will host local performers, artists, and speakers. Graduated fellows, current fellows, staff, and anyone else in the Havenly community will gather at community meetings weekly.
“There’s power in the connections and networks created in this space,” said Passoni.
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Salt // ملح
Beyond Havenly’s physical space, al Abbas and Passoni hope their Fellowship Program will lay the foundation for a more emergent aspect of the restaurant: advocacy efforts. When Güiza-Chavez joined the team, she immediately questioned why Havenly wasn’t involved in political organizing. The women in the program have the agency to respond to injustices in the world—she wanted to see Havenly help them realize that and act upon it. And the first step to achieve that goal is building advocacy-based language skills.
The initial ESL curriculum was culinary-based, with the fellows primarily focused on learning words for different objects in the kitchen. However, Güiza-Chavez restructured the curriculum to be more complex and grounded. Now, the fellows are learning English through a discussion of their feelings surrounding social justice issues.
“The fellows learn the words ‘Supreme Court’ and ‘injustice’ before they learn ‘salt,’” said Passoni. Being equipped with these language tools and learning stories in the advocacy class about community organizers such as Rosa Parks and Ilhan Omar provides the fellows with knowledge about the ways they can influence their own communities.
For example, after learning about petition organizing in their advocacy class, the second cohort of women approached Güiza-Chavez and asked if they could start a petition for New Haven public schools to recognize the Islamic holiday of Eid. When the Black Lives Matter movement protested George Floyd’s murder this summer, the fellows wrote statements in solidarity that were shared on Havenly’s Instagram.
Perhaps the most impactful organizing effort the women have helped organize is the food relief program. When the pandemic first hit in March, Passoni brought it to al-Abbas’ and the other fellows’ attention that unemployment and financial stress was increasing in New Haven, especially for undocumented immigrants who were excluded from government support. The idea of a food relief program was born, and al-Abbas, who had learned about undocumented immigrants’ struggles in the advocacy curriculum, insisted that they donate meals to that community in New Haven.
The program launched in May, with al-Abbas and the other women prepping hundreds of boxes of pea-filled rice, yogurt-cucumber salad, and cheese fatayer to be distributed to the community. The beginning of the program coincided with the Islamic month of Ramadan, which made running the program a difficult task for the women.
Every day, the fellows woke up before sunrise to have a light breakfast in preparation for the day of fasting, then readied themselves for a full day in the kitchen. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., al-Abbas and the fellows filled up pots with rice and platters with fatayer, trying to ignore their increasing hunger and thirst. The heat was seeping into the kitchen, and the air conditioning hadn’t been installed yet. However, as the styrofoam boxes of food stacked up on the counter, the feelings of hunger and exhaustion were replaced by gratitude and fulfilment.
“If you do good for others, it will lift afflictions from the world,” said al-Abbas. The food relief program was a huge success, providing 5,000 meals to the New Haven community between May and June, and is still being continued to this day.
These organizing efforts have made Havenly a transformative force within the New Haven community, one that crosses group identities and recognizes the interconnectivity between different marginalized groups’ struggles.
Because the women in Havenly’s program face immediate stereotyping upon their entry into the workforce, anti-racism work is especially important to Havenly’s mission.
Güiza-Chavez poses the question, “How do we use what we have and really work towards our mission, not just from…within the walls of 25 Temple Street, but how do we be part of a movement that is working with anti-racist organizers?”
The ultimate goal of the Havenly program is to create an organizing framework in which the women themselves shape the community they’re in. Havenly does not aim to simply advocate for refugee women; it seeks to help the women feel that if they see an injustice, they have the agency to change it—because they do.
“How do we use this space that we’re creating together to be one that’s really powerful and that kind of amplifies the voices of this community?” asked Güiza-Chavez. “That’s something I’m excited to keep seeing unfold.”
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** الروح // The Soul
For over a decade, al-Abbas has lived through war, financial uncertainty, and emotional isolation. While she and her family whispered prayers in their home together in Baghdad with hopes for a better life, al-Abbas never would have imagined herself opening a restaurant in a New England college city. Now, she is training a group of fellow refugee women and helping to lead discussions about refugee integration in New Haven.
Havenly’s first conversations were centered around ideas for physically transforming their space. Several months and a lot of renovations later, the conversations at Havenly now buzz with ideas about nurturing and transforming communities.
On a normal late afternoon at Havenly, you can find at least a couple of fellows and employees running the front counter while dancing and singing along to Arabic music. Several students are seated along the bar table, doing homework or sharing about local organizing work they’re involved in. In the kitchen, al-Abbas and two Sudanese fellows are frying falafel and chatting about the similarities between Iraqi and Sudanese cuisine. In a conference room at the back of the restaurant, Passoni and Güiza-Chavez are mapping out ideas for the future of the organization on a whiteboard.
These conversations are at the heart of Havenly, woven into the fabric of the organization. Much as the women developed meaningful relationships with each other, the ever-growing Havenly community continues to touch the lives of everyone who interacts with its mission, whether through a customer admiring their chalkboard art or a newly resettled refugee woman looking for ways to support her family.
The soul of Havenly doesn’t lie in its Turkish coffee, its comfort food dishes, or even its signature baklava—it lies in the stories and conversations that have brought the Havenly community together.