Welcome to The Table Between…
Hi! I’m Jess Haque…chef, writer, mother, creative, chronic list-keeper and lover of organization/hater of cleaning…I’m the woman who burned it all down to build back something better, something more…me.
I grew up in South Carolina where food was how you loved people, how you grieve them, how you show up when there were no words. I spent 15+ years in marketing & graphic design before I moved to New York City in 2020 with zero professional kitchen experience…during the pandemic…and somehow became an Executive Chef of a restaurant in the Upper West Side in under two years.
Then I left while I was at the top because 80-hour weeks and single motherhood didn’t quite MATH the way I needed them to, and my daughter Millie said 'f*ck this noise’. So now, I’m running my own hospitality studio, The Freckled Fork, where I make food, I make space and I set the table for all to come join me. And in the in-between, I write.
Visit me at The Freckled Fork to learn more or over on Instagram where I try to avoid the doom-scroll & keep things real.
Subscribe today for free or better yet, for the price of a Flat White, you can keep me caffeinated and keep me writing.
The Table Between
Sundays I go long. Personal essays that are unhinged and unpolished in ways that feel safe…mask off, performance halted…what it means to be a woman holding ambition and softness in the same hands, at the same time. Food is always somewhere in it, because food is how I understand everything else.
Thursdays are for Setting the Table — shorter, warmer. A collection of links and reads from around the ‘stack-a-verse that inspire and make you feel something.
Sometimes I even go totally off the rails and dive into poetry…I have no clue what I’m doing there, but join me anyways…
This is for you if…
You’ve ever looked up from a life you built carefully and thought...wait, do I actually want to be here?
You’re carrying more complexity than you can admit…fulfilled and exhausted in the same hour, certain of your purpose and completely unsure of your next step…those who are brimming with contradictions.
You believe a meal can say what language can’t…that feeding someone is an act of love…a political statement…and a form of prayer all at once.
You want to read the hard, true thing…without judgement, without hiding, without performance, without the polish.
I cook…I build…I write so people feel seen…so they feel known, so they feel belonging.
That’s the table I’m crafting here…everything else is just me figuring out how.
Pull up a chair, there’s space for you here.
