Farheen Jafarey

Head Baker

A happy accident led Farheen from being a college counselor in her native Pakistan to become Hav & Mar’s Head Baker.  She was teaching history and counseling young college students for 14 years when her husband’s job led them to leave and move to United Arab Emirates and to enroll in a local culinary school.  There, Farheen found her calling, a devotion seeded long ago by her father who freshly milled his own grain to bake fresh loaves at home.  At culinary school, she observed “all my classmates and teachers were younger than me, but learning has no age limit.”  While she was supposed to return to Pakistan with her husband, she decided to further her love of baking and applied to the International Culinary Center’s bread program in New York. A fateful stop at the career fair led her into the professional kitchen at the age of 50, where she joined Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster in Harlem as a baker.  The three month stint evolved and soon she was sharing recipes for curry and living on a different continent from her husband.  Her knowledge and passion for bread now grows as she is developing a bread program that ranges from Ethiopian injera and Indian dosas to flatbreads and biscuits that are at the heart of the Hav & Mar menu.