We all daydream about leading a more exotic life, but Jennifer Smith, who worked in investment banking in the City before training as a professional chef and opening a guest house in Fez, didn’t look down before making the leap. Perhaps that’s the secret.

Smith, an American, has mainly avoided well-trodden paths. She signed on to study classics at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, before semesters in Rome and then, in Athens, persuaded her that a life working in basement libraries studying the past was not for her. Luckily, she was allowed to switch to Middle Eastern studies and a year in Syria on a Fulbright Scholarship followed. A love affair then brought her to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where she completed her postgraduate studies. But what to do next?

“I felt so aimless. I did not really feel any draw anywhere. Advertising sounded good; banking sounded good and in the end, I thought, until I figure out what it is that I really want to do, I might as well make some money. So that is what I did.”

Smith worked in the City for three and-a-half years, first at the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi and then Standard Chartered Bank. While she found the switch to economics stimulating, Smith knew that banking wasn’t going to hold her interest. “At the end of the day, I just didn’t feel that I was adding value to anybody’s life,” she says. Her friends finally convinced her to stop whining about her day job and “do something else”.

She resigned one Monday morning and the something else turned out to be a six-month cordon bleu cookery course at Tante Marie, a cookery school. While her first job – cooking for 16 at a rustic cabin in Scotland without even basic equipment – made her cry, some great jobs followed and it was time to put phase two of her plan into action.

Less than a year after graduating from cookery school, Smith was the proud owner of a riad-style house in Fez, badly in need of renovation before she could open it as a guesthouse. She used her bank training to put together a business plan but after only 24 hours in her new home she realised that her calculations were all “utterly useless”. It took four years to open the guesthouse, not months as she’d hoped.

“I lived extremely simply. I could live on £100 a month here... because I was living in my building site. I was sleeping on sheepskins. I didn’t travel, buy new clothes. I had no expenses, I was washing my clothing by hand.”

The reality of following a dream is the hard work but there was also time for some romance. Smith married an American guitarist studying flamenco in Fez and they now run the guesthouse together.

“It is hard work. Harder than I expected, but because we are working for ourselves and we are doing something that we really love, it doesn’t always feel like work.”

www.darroumana.com

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