Time Out’s Best Young Chefs in New York City right now

As a kid, Haley Duren used to tell her mother that she would be a vegetarian if not for bacon and chicken wings. But things changed quickly as she grew older and began researching the food industry and its inhumane treatment of animals.

“I learned more about our food systems, took a deep dive into factory farming and how the food gets onto our plate,” she says. Consciously, she fully transitioned to vegetarianism and then to a fully vegan lifestyle. As a result, her cookery also followed. 

But with a pastry degree that taught her little about how to reimagine vegan food, she moved from New Mexico to New York to deepen her knowledge. Duren trained in some of the city’s finest plant-based kitchens, including Amanda Cohen’s pioneering restaurant of the cuisine, Dirt Candy, and vegan sushi restaurant Planta. 

But as a frequent flyer of the East Village’s vegan and natural wine bar, Soda Club, Duren saw a chance. She cold-emailed Overthrow Hospitality, the award-winning vegan hospitality group behind it, and asked about a position. Her boldness paid off, leading to her largest career move yet: becoming the executive chef of the East Village’s Cadence at the ripe age of 27. During her tenure, Duren has carried on the plant-forward, soul-stirring ethos that former Cadence chef Shennari Freedman ushered in, all while incorporating her own style.

"I had the idea of putting my own Southwestern spin on it with flavors that I grew up eating. It really helped me blend it into Shennari's legacy while putting my own flair to it," she says. In her short tenure, Duren's menus have included sugar-dusted sopapillas served with a seven-hour slow-cooked honey, to white cheddar mac and cheese stirred with the state's staple: green chilies. 

Though Cadence is coming to a close at the end of this year, Duren is staying on with the hospitality group, working on a new hush-hush concept that explores how flavors adapt over time. With what Duren has created in her short stint thus far, it is safe to say that we can’t wait to see what time will bring.

Chef Rasika Venkatesa's formative years in Chennai, India, were spent watching her grandmother show her family love the best way she knew how: through food. And as someone who so admired her grandmother—Venkatesa says her family members would refer to her as her grandmother's pet—it is no surprise that the chef now shares her passion in the same way.

Growing up, Venkatesa's interest in food only widened further; her TV obsessions leaned toward Food Network and Top Chef. Sensing her interests, it was her father who encouraged her to pursue her cooking career regardless of the status quo.

"Passion didn't really make career choices," she told Time Out, commenting on how the culture trained her to think about a career in medicine or tech. "But my dad [said], ‘Why don't you do something that you like in your life?’”

Yet, after completing a bachelor's in hotel management and hospitality at Manipal University, Venkatesa found that India's culinary industry wasn't very welcoming to women who set out to make it there. So she set her sights further, cooking in kitchens in Sydney and applying to Michelin-starred restaurants in the States on a whim with "no hope of getting a reply." To her surprise, she received a callback from Thomas Keller's three-Michelin-starred restaurant, The French Laundry, moved to California and started work as a commis before being promoted to chef de partie. Venkatesa soon moved to San Francisco's one-Michelin-starred Mourad, where she became one of the youngest chef de cuisines in the country. In fact, it was Mourad Lahlou who encouraged her to apply for Top Chef, and she went on to compete in season 21.

Now Venkatesa is going back to where it all started. In May 2024, the chef launched Mythily, a progressive Indian pop-up concept named after her grandmother. With the hopes of transitioning to a brick-and-mortar, Venkatesa builds off the recipes of her family, the cookery she found traveling around her home state of Tamil Nadu and her drive to push the cuisine forward even further.

"There's no one set way to represent a cuisine—it is about respecting the culture, respecting cuisine, respecting the history, but there are ways in which you can represent it yourself," she shares.

Much of chef Tony Yarema’s young adult years were spent traveling across Northwest Africa, building commercial clay ovens in Morocco and learning how to make bread from any mom-and-pop shop that would teach him. He traveled to Lebanon and Syria, working in local restaurants and learning the foundations of Middle Eastern cuisine. Later in Bologna, he studied the art of Italian cooking and discovered the power of simple ingredients—salt, flour and water. 

Yarema eventually returned to the States, working in restaurants throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan for several years. But his time climbing the ranks in the kitchen was a long, relentless race, with constant pressure to sell as much food as possible, having to discard massive amounts of food and all the plastic, glass and aluminum it came in. “I wanted something that felt more in line with the kind of life I wanted to live and give people a product that felt like I was doing something for them, not just cooking for them,” he tells us. He found his answer through a Craigslist ad for a head baker. 

Now, after a successful summer opening in 2024, Yarema serves as the owner and head baker of Bakery by Textbook. He’s responsible not only for the food coming out of their oven, but for shaping the business’s values. The shop is run mainly by Bed-Stuy locals, each earning $20 an hour plus tips, and the bakery’s “Name Your Price Bread” incentive ensures that anyone who comes in can enjoy their focaccia or sourdough—and pay whatever they can afford. Recently, his team kept extra eggs in stock and sold them at market value to help those facing inflated grocery store prices. Yarema, in all his modesty, just wants to do what’s best for the people. “Bread is something that everyone should be able to afford and eat,” he says. “It’s on us to take the risk [financially] and propel these programs forward. Then, hopefully, other places will do them.”