4/11/2008 9:53:00 AM COVER: Something to Chew On
Atlanta’s kosher options keep changing
Jodie Sturgeon (left) brings experience to her new role as the owner of Bagel Break.
Jeff and Allison Rosengarten were quick to seek kosher certification for Ali’s Cookies. The Bresserie is a new option for brisket.
Kosher Connection
To keep up with kosher dining in Atlanta, there is a treasure online besides the Atlanta Kashruth Commission's www.kosheratlanta.org.
Natan Starkman of Toco Hills said his sister set up a site May 31, 1995, to tell Atlantans about kosher restaurants. Starkman said no other online kosher directory existed then.
Starkman took over the labor of love when his sister left the area. The site is full of great information that is up-to-date, including the latest from the AKC, although the site is not affiliated with the commission. Check out Kosher Eating in Atlanta at www.starkman.com/natan/ kosher_eating_in_atlanta.html.
Take Me Out to the Ballgame
You can get kosher Ali's Cookies any time at the 755 Club at Turner Field, but a full range of kosher ballpark fare will be available Sunday, May 25, when the Atlanta Kashruth Commission, the Marcus JCC and others celebrate Israel's 60th birthday with the annual Kosher Day at the Ted.
The Braves will play the Arizona Diamondbacks at 1:35 p.m. that day. Pre-game festivities will include music and contests. A $10 ticket gets you a seat and access to the pre-game celebration. For $20, you also get a voucher for a kosher hot dog, chips and a drink. For $30, you also get a parking pass and a raffle ticket.
For tickets or more information, contact the AKC at akc@kosheratlanta.org, (404) 634-4063, or 1855 LaVista Road NE, Atlanta, Ga. 30329.
Dining Out
The Atlanta Kashruth Commission certifies the following restaurants:
Bagel Break, dairy, 6333 Roswell Road, Sandy Springs, (404) 255-6055.
Broadway Cafe, dairy, 2166 Briarcliff Road, Toco Hills, (404) 329-0888.
Cafe Ofi, dairy, 5342 Tilly Mill Road (inside the Marcus JCC), Dunwoody, (678) 812-3993.
Off-Broadway, meat, 2166 Briarcliff Road, Toco Hills, (404) 633-9288.
Pita House, meat, 4639-D N. Shallowford Road, Dunwoody, (770) 452-9599.
Pita Palace, meat, 1658 LaVista Road, Toco Hills, (404) 781-7482.
Also in this story:
Ali's Cookies, dairy, 1255-13 Johnson Ferry Road, Marietta, (770) 971-8566.
Simcha Bakery, parve, 2899-A N. Druid Hills Road, Toco Hills, (404) 781-2253.
Marcy J. Levinson Staff Writer
The kosher dining menu across Jewish Atlanta has been overhauled in recent months.
A new meat restaurant opened in Dunwoody while another closed, although it could reopen soon. A longtime dairy dining option in Toco Hills has been transformed into a meat restaurant. A Sandy Springs bagel shop has changed ownership. And bakeries in Toco Hills and East Cobb now can meet the needs of your kosher sweet tooth.
The changes come amid a continuing mystery: Why do kosher establishments seem to struggle so much in a Jewish community of 125,000-plus people?
The latest kosher restaurant to close is the Jerusalem Grill, which served shwarma, falafel and other Israeli dishes at the back of Sabra Market in Dunwoody.
Israeli Motty Zilberman took over the Sabra restaurant space last spring, brought in a new menu and the Jerusalem Grill name, and drew a good crowd of Israelis on Sundays. But business was light Monday through Friday, and the restaurant closed in February after about 10 months in operation.
Zilberman could not be reached for comment. Sabra managers said they anticipate another restaurant opening in the store after Passover, and the Atlanta Kashruth Commission's Web page calls the eatery "temporarily closed."
The AKC is the governing board for kosher standards in Jewish Atlanta. Under Rabbi Reuven Stein, the agency oversees food rules for restaurants, bakeries, hotels and even Turner Field.
Because ensuring kashrut involves having an AKC-certified mashgiach (kosher supervisor) on site at all times during food preparation, business owners take on a significant expense to make their establishments kosher. Rabbi Stein has high hopes that the Jewish community will make the effort and expense worthwhile for Atlanta eateries.
But he also is realistic about the Orthodox community, which made up 9 percent of Jewish Atlanta as of 2006, according to a Federation demographic study. Rabbi Stein noted in an e-mail interview that the kosher-eating Orthodox community in Atlanta is not that large - perhaps 12,000 people - and that not all the families are "overly affluent and can afford to go out to eat."
He said food service is a hard industry, with about 80 percent of nonkosher restaurants closing within two years.
Kosher restaurateur Mordekhay Cohen said the problem for kosher eateries could be a Southern thing.
"I came to Atlanta from New York five years ago, and people in New York go out to eat every night, the kitchens are so small there. Here in the South, people have huge kitchens and love to cook at home," he said. Less dining out means less business for kosher restaurants.
Cohen said that while kosher ingredients are more expensive, he tries to keep his prices reasonable. He said he'd rather go out to eat a kosher meal regardless of the price.
For about two years, he gave kosher diners the option to eat pizza as he ran Pizza Palace in Toco Hills. But he has closed Pizza Palace and opened Bresserie Kosher Barbecue.
"My love is for meat," he said. "I know how to deal with meat more than dairy."
The Bresserie menu features a tender, well-seasoned chopped brisket sandwich on a freshly baked kaiser roll with thickly cut steak fries and tangy coleslaw for $9.95.
Back in Dunwoody, kosher diners haven't been left hungry by the closing, however temporary, of the Jerusalem Grill, thanks to the recent opening of the Pita House. It features a similar menu built around shwarma, falafel and grilled chicken.
Owners Shoshi and Haim Javitz are thrilled about the restaurant's location just off Interstate 285 at Exit 30, its atmosphere and its success in its first five weeks.
Shoshi is a Hebrew teacher at Torah Day School of Atlanta. She and her husband owned restaurants in their native Israel, then in New York, and now in Atlanta, where they have lived for seven years.
Shoshi, who helps her husband at the Pita House on Sundays, said the Israeli community and the overall Jewish community "were thirsty for this kind of place."
"It's become a place everyone can meet, play chess, watch TV. It's like a place to socialize," she said. "It is even a place where boys can meet girls."
The strongest response has been to the shwarma, she said. "People say it tastes just like it does in Israel. Here it is like one foot is in Atlanta, the other in Israel."
In Sandy Springs, Bagel Break remains a dairy dining option, but under new ownership. Still, don't expect any major changes because the new owner is Jodie Sturgeon, who has worked five years at the bagel shop.
Former owners Donna and Mel Meyer offered the business to Sturgeon, and she took over in December. Donna Meyer still serves as the event coordinator for Bagel Break's kosher catering operation, For All Occasions. Bagel Break also does the kitchen work and cooking for the Weber School.
Sturgeon said the business couldn't survive if its sole income was the bagel shop, but the catering operation is thriving. Big jobs this spring include Hillels of Georgia's Campus SuperStar finale, Temple Emanu-El's 30th anniversary gala, Congregation Ariel's honors dinner and various Passover menus. Sturgeon has a team of up to 10 employees to serve the Jewish community.
Inside the bagel shop, expect the same homemade bagels, challah and hand-mixed, flavored cream cheese. The only additions Sturgeon is considering are a salad bar within six months and paninis.
On the sweeter side of eating, Atlanta now has two bakeries supervised by the AKC.
Ali's Cookies is the former Chocolate Chips Co. on Johnson Ferry Road in East Cobb. The doors of the cookie shop have been open for almost 30 years, but under the new ownership of Jeff and Allison Rosengarten, the store offers an AKC certificate along with the popular cookies.
As members of Congregation Ariel, the Rosengartens said their business venture is an extension of their standards. They said they could not sell food that wasn't kosher to the Jewish community.
"We bought it in January and the next week turned it over" to kashrut, Allison said.
Jeff said that when he began going through the ingredients on the shelves, almost everything was kosher. They used the nonkosher items in that first week and gave away the cookies to firefighters, police and anyone else who wanted samples.
It took about two days under AKC supervision to kasher the equipment. The Rosengartens had to take all of their metal cooking items to the dish mikvah in January, but the AKC got some students to help them dip the metal into the water on the 20-degree morning.
The Rosengartens said kashrut means a lot outside the Jewish community as well.
"People perceive kosher as a high standard, and people proudly display the kosher symbol," Jeff said.
He said the former owners, though the company changed hands a few times, established a reputation for the highest quality of products. Now the store is stricter about not allowing suppliers to make ingredient substitutions, and other standards must be followed within the bakery, but otherwise not much has changed, the Rosengartens said.
The only parve recipes - free of meat and dairy - right now are the chocolate chunk and the fruit natural skinny minnie, but the cookie cakes are all DE, meaning they are nondairy products prepared on dairy equipment. They therefore are OK to eat after, but not with, a meat meal. And the Rosengartens can make a parve cookie cake.
The biggest obstacle for the Rosengartens in going kosher was that the store's busiest day for decades was Saturday, when day-old cookies were a popular item. Now the shop is closed Saturday for Shabbat, and the couple won't sell 2-day-old cookies on Sundays.
A Congregation Ariel member who insisted on anonymity solved that problem by making a deal to buy all leftover cookies on Friday afternoons, to be served at kiddush after Saturday morning services at the Dunwoody synagogue.
You also can find Ali's Cookies products in a less likely location than Congregation Ariel: Turner Field. A conversation the couple had with a chef at the 755 Club at Turner Field during a bar mitzvah celebration led to an order of 2,000 cookies per week for the club. The Rosengartens said it has been a great opportunity to bring kosher food to the baseball stadium.
While the kosher cookie business is booming, so is demand for a range of baked goods at the Simcha Bakery in Toco Hills, opened by three partners in January.
The managing partner, Reuven Robbins, has shown he knows how to put together a successful recipe for kosher food sales as the owner-operator of Chinese restaurant Chai Peking inside the Toco Hills Kroger. Now he's working alongside physician Barry Diner and Ron Green to cater to the bakery needs not only of the Jewish community, but also of those who are lactose-intolerant.
The entire bakery is dairy-free and certified parve by the AKC, Diner said.
"Our quality is way better than those other places," Diner said of the chain grocery stores that sell kosher baked goods.
He said Simcha Bakery has the dairy-free and kosher markets tapped and offers top-notch products because all it does is bake.
Early on a recent Friday, Diner was pleased to report he was standing in a "nearly empty bakery" after almost everything had been sold. He said that success let the partners know the community has a need and a desire for good kosher food.
Reader Comments
Posted: Thursday, April 17, 2008
Article comment by:
Sharon Jordan
Re: increasing business traffic - it may help is to widen your marketing efforts. The food is DELECTABLE at the few Jewish places that I've tried in town, but I only found out about them by accident. I've spent some time in Europe and Africa and am addicted to Mediterranean cuisine. There are others like me who are potential clients, but without some info making it to us, we don't always find these hot spots before they've closed. Some of us attend films during the Jewish film festival... has anyone considered having a Jewish CUISINE festival, or 'Taste of Israel', or something similar? "If you hold it we will come... and EAT!!" :-)
