She paid $65 for LinkedIn Plus at midnight because she felt the urgency.
She didn’t know if they were hiring, she didn’t even know what position she wanted…she just knew she wanted in and she was done with her current situation. So she made an account, paid the money, found the guy in charge, and sent the message. At midnight.
At 8am the next morning he replied.
That’s Haley Duren. Executive Chef at Long Count in the East Village. Twenty-eight years old. Running a small, but mighty female kitchen with her girl Carmen, and doing the damn thing entirely on her own terms.
I sat down with her last week over Raisin Bran and oat milk for the first episode of Between Bowls and I have not stopped thinking about her story since.
Because I did the same thing.
Not LinkedIn perse, but the sending of cold emails. Plural. Sent from my time during the pandemic in our small apartment in May of 2020, to every restaurant I could find in New York City, begging someone…anyone…to let me cook in their kitchen. I had zero experience. I had fifteen years of marketing behind me and a whole lot of nerve and approximately nothing else to offer.
The responses I got back were kind versions of absolutely not. We don’t even know if we’re opening again. Good luck, but no. Come back when you have experience. The classic catch-22 of trying to start over at the wrong time in the wrong city in the middle of a global catastrophe.
I kept sending anyway.
Haley kept sending hers anyway, too. Different era, different platform, same audacity, same refusal to wait for someone to hand her an opening. She would need to nudge the door open herself.
That’s what Between Bowls is about.
Not just cereal…well, also cereal. When I was running kitchens I came home every single night after service and poured myself a bowl. Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms, Reese’s Puffs. Didn’t matter how fancy the food was that day. At midnight all I wanted was cereal and my couch and the specific silence of having nothing left to perform.
That’s when the real conversations happened. When the apron was off, and I was just a person with a spoon.
So that’s the format. Two chefs, a bowl of whatever they grew up eating, and a real conversation. No green rooms. No PR answers. Just the honest stuff about how they got here, how they lead, and what it actually costs to build something in this city.
Haley chose Raisin Bran because her mom wouldn’t let her have the sugary ones. She’s been eating it since she was a kid, and she loves it now. That felt right.
Today is International Women’s Day, and I want to be honest about what that means to me in the context of food.
It doesn’t mean an Instagram graphic with a pink background, or token highlights of women that so often get overworked and overlooked on any other given day…it can’t just mean a listicle of females to follow.
It should mean Haley Duren paying $65 at midnight because she was done waiting. It’s about her and Carmen running a full-service kitchen…giggling, playing with food, blasting Bad Bunny, and then “Uncle Haley’s” eighties R&B…and doing it without the toxic masculinity that most of us have just accepted as part of the job.
It means Haley standing tableside talking about rainbow carrots from Halal Pasture Farms with so much genuine excitement that people who have never cared about vegetables suddenly care about vegetables.
It means being 28 and already knowing that your legacy is about making space. Not shifting anyone’s dietary choices…not performing wellness…but really giving it her all to make vegan cuisine so undeniably good that the conversation shifts. That the word vegan stops being the first thing people reach for, and the word delicious gets there first.
It means the two of us sitting across from each other over cereal, realizing we had done the exact same thing…refused to wait, refused to be told no, packed up our whole lives and moved toward the thing we wanted even when the timing was terrible, and the odds were not in our favor.
Between Bowls Episode 1 is live on YouTube today.
Go watch it. Then head to Long Count in the East Village to eat Haley’s food. And, don’t forget to tell her Jess says hey.
And if you’re sitting on a cold message you haven’t sent yet…send it. Worst they can say is no. Best case, you end up running a kitchen with zero culinary experience at 40 or, better yet, running a kitchen in New York City at 28.
The $65 and Haley’s audacity to put it all out there…was totally worth it.
Between Bowls is a video series featuring female head chefs across New York City filmed over cereal. New episodes dropping regularly here and on Youtube. Subscribe so you don’t miss them.
Also, if you have a female chef that should be on the series, holla at me. I’d love to meet them, and of course, bring their favorite cereal.
