Jess Haque is a New York–based chef, writer & creative whose career spans professional kitchens, hospitality leadership and more than 15+ years in marketing and design.
She moved to NYC in 2020 and began at the very bottom of restaurant kitchens…working her way from line cook to sous chef to head chef in a short, intense stretch of just 1 year. By 2023, she was Executive Chef at North Miznon and was tasked with opening a new concept, Malka, which remains one of the hottest restaurants, most sought-after reservations in NYC. She’s run high-volume kitchens, built teams, developed menus, and learned where systems break under pressure and how to build ones that don’t burn people out.
Her work is rooted in hospitality as a language…one that tells stories, creates belonging, and turns everyday moments into something considered & memorable. Whether she’s cooking for a room or shaping a brand narrative, her focus is always the same: care, clarity & connection.
Her food is not fusion for trend’s sake…it’s food shaped by life. And in the middle of all of it, someone asked her a question that changed everything…
Her Answer
Jess was still early in her kitchen life, still figuring out how to fake it until you make it, when chef Eyal Shani asked every cook in the room: why do you cook?
The other chefs answered with craft, with lineage, with the polished answers that come from years of press dinners and panels.
When her turn came, Jess just said the only thing she knew for certain:
I cook so people feel seen…so they feel known,
even just for the length of a meal.
That answer is still the spine of everything she’s building.
The Freckled Fork was born out of that journey. It carries everything she’s learned: the Southern table she grew up at, the visual precision she spent years developing, the kitchen rigor she earned & a hospitality philosophy she believes in the way some people believe in laws.
See the person, give without running a tally,
think about guests before they arrive.
Jess’s work is seasonal and farm-to-table by nature, Southern-rooted with Mediterranean instinct, and increasingly shaped by the various flavors of the world she’s been learning to cook with and love. She thrives at the intersection of her fine dining discipline and her lived experience of motherhood, loss, reinvention & rebuilding.
Jess writes about all of it…the food, the pivot, the building, the philosophy…on Substack, The Table Between.
She lives & works on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she cooks for private clients, companies, venues, and anyone who wants a table where they feel taken care of. If that’s you, I’d love to hear from you.
