The Kosher Palate sets up shop in South Bay

When Michele Grant was scouting locations for T.K.P. Provisions, her new kosher restaurant and specialty foods shop, she looked at several neighborhoods with established kosher scenes and large Orthodox populations.

But customers of her food truck, The Kosher Palate, kept telling her they craved hechshered eats in the South Bay.

“If you want to take your kids out for pizza,” Grant heard again and again, “you have to pile everybody in the car. It becomes an endeavor, rather than just going to grab a bite.”

Grant already had been making periodic stops with her truck in cities such as Tujunga and San Pedro to expand kosher food access. So when she found a property in Redondo Beach that had housed delis for decades, she decided to set up shop with her smoked meats and fancy salts.

The South Bay has long had a Jewish population, but today, increasing numbers of observant Jews are living and working there.

Rabbi Yossi Mintz of Chabad of the Beach Cities said the area’s Orthodox population has increased slowly but steadily for the past decade, with the biggest gains in the last three to five years.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles President Jay Sanderson said his organization doesn’t have recent statistics on Jewish demographics in the region, but he confirmed the growth.

Mintz’s synagogue — one of four Chabad centers in the South Bay — has around 170 children in its preschool and the shul is preparing to found a day school serving children in grades one through five, and is hoping, Mintz said, to expand to older students in the future.

Chabad of the Beach Cities opened a mikveh in 2008. Community member Josef Gorowitz said there also has been talk of establishing an eruv.  

T.K.P. Provisions is the South Bay’s third kosher restaurant. The Bagel Factory has a location in Torrance, and Chayo Eatery opened there last year, offering dairy sandwiches, salads and pizza.

With the launch of Grant’s restaurant in July, kosher diners now have their first South Bay meat option — and one with artisanal ambitions.

T.K.P. Provisions smokes and roasts its own beef and turkey, and Grant hopes to create duck or goose pastrami in the future.

She has reimagined traditional deli favorites, stuffing pita with beef tongue and serving roast beef with horseradish oil. She especially likes to incorporate Middle Eastern flavors such as pomegranate curry mustard and zhug, a Yemenite hot sauce.

Salads feature yellowfin tuna, pickled trout and glazed tempeh.

Grant also sells fresh-pressed juices and T.K.P.-fermented kombucha, as well as a host of specialty kosher groceries, many of them made in-house. Customers can buy cashew cheese, gourmet olive oils and the spicy-sweet tomato jam The Kosher Palate serves on its burgers.

T.K.P. Provisions is part of a larger wave of Jewish artisanal delis around North America. Wexler’s Deli, which opened this April in downtown L.A.’s Grand Central Market, has become the darling of local foodies. 

But most of the new delis are not kosher.  

Grant started serving kosher food in 2012, at her Kosher Palate farmers market booth that focused on vegetarian and vegan dishes. Her business grew into a food truck the following year. (The truck is still operating on a limited schedule.)

Before that, Grant helped run The Grilled Cheese Truck, and she cooked privately for people with special dietary needs. 

Some of her biggest culinary passions revolve around sustainable sourcing and homemade, healthy meals. Those ideas are trending in the secular food world right now, and Grant hopes to encourage the observant Jewish community to adopt them into their diet habits. 

“I’ll know we’re a success if someone comes in and they’re engaging with what they’re putting in their bodies,” she said.

Redondo Beach resident and Chabad of the Beach Cities member Jeff Gelb said he is very happy to see another kosher restaurant opening in the area and that he would love it if a fancy sit-down establishment, like Pat’s in Pico-Robertson, would come to town.

Knowing that much of her clientele comes from Chabad, Grant uses the Lubavitch-slaughtered meat and pas Yisroel bread that many prefer.

But Gelb stressed that his community is very diverse, a mix of Jews ranging from the not-particularly observant to many varieties of Orthodox. Some people walk three miles to reach a synagogue on Shabbat, he said.

That’s a relatively new image in the South Bay, where Jewish residents historically have been a fairly unaffiliated bunch.

They’re usually more interested in the area’s schools or beaches than in finding a religious community, and some of them may even be trying to avoid it, said Robin Franko, a longtime Rancho Palos Verdes resident who once led Federation’s former South Bay Council.

“If they wanted to live in a highly identified Jewish community, they would have stayed in L.A. or maybe the Valley,” Franko mused.

Grant, for her part, is still settling in. 

Her staff is not able to do major cooking at the restaurant right now, shuttling meal components from a prep kitchen in Gardena. They hope to begin construction on a heavy-duty, in-house heating and ventilation system in the fall. Grant chose to open before that because she wanted to catch the summer beach crowd, both kosher and not.

“We’ve already been incredibly embraced by the Jewish community down here, and also more and more by the neighborhood just coming by to check us out and see what we’re doing,” Grant said.

“The more I looked at it and the more I looked around, it really became the most logical place to be.”