March 5, 2013 | 11:18 am

Passover at Street

Posted by Rob Eshman

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Call me old-fashioned, but if a restaurant is going to hold a Passover seder, shouldn't it at least be on Passover?

That's one thing I like about Chef Susan Feniger's seder at her restaurant Street.  It's on Tuesday, March 26 at 5 pm, the second night of Passover.

The other thing I like is the menu.  Here it is:

 

Russian Eggplant with Buttermilk Sauce and Mint Oil

Green Ben Salad with Watercress and Chopped Egg Gribiche
(vegan version made with Chopped Olive Vinaigrette)

Heirloom Spinach Soup with Matzo Balls

Choice of:

Lamb Musubi
with Saffron Rice, Pepper Sauce, Grapeleaf, and Pickled Almonds
(vegan version made with Harissa Crusted Roast Tomato)

Or

Matzo Crusted Spring Nettle Cakes
with Mustard Sauce and Smoked Halibut
(vegan version made with Smoked Mushroom)


Coconut Macaroons
dipped in Moroccan Spiced Chocolate

*Full wine list and cocktails will also be available.

KID’S MENU:      
Heirloom Spinach Soup with Matzo Balls

Roasted Lamb or Baked Halibut

Green Bean Salad with Lemon and Olive Oil

Rice

Coconut Macaroons
dipped in Moroccan Spiced Chocolate

 

Granted, it's NOT kosher (can I be more clear), and it combines milk with meat, another no no, but it does nod to the strictures of Passover by using matzo, and not using any breads or grains forbidden during the holiday.  Plus, it looks really good.

Rabbi Eleanor Steinman from the congregation Kol Ami will lead the Seder, as she has for the past few years.  It's $55/pp. For more information, call 323.203.0500. 

And to go with it, here's a video on "How to Make Your Own Matzo" from the web site DIYfood.com.  I'm going to assume Feniger's seder will include her homemade matzo as well.

February 20, 2013 | 12:22 pm

West Hollywood’s Ta-eem Grill, a spot for vegan and meat eaters

Posted by Rob Eshman

My favorite vegan food in Los Angeles these days comes from a small, crowded restaurant on Melrose with a giant skewer of animal flesh rotating in the window.

In a city that seems to be enthralled with new vegan and conscious-food temples, like Café Gratitude and Feed Body & Soul, that statement may come as a shock. These are places filled with raw kale, beautiful actors (both serving and eating) and menus that describe food in such spiritual terms, you’d think you were in shul.

Meanwhile, West Hollywood’s Ta-eem Grill, which specializes in the kind of Israeli street food you’d eat standing up at the Shuk HaCarmel, has no such pretenses.

But much of the food is naturally vegan. And if it’s a dose of spirituality you want, Ta-eem has that, too — without the self-consciousness and self-promotion. 

That comes in the form of the owner, chef and proprietor, Yoel Kraizberger.

It is the animating spirit of Kraizberger, as much as his superb food, that allows me to compare a tiny hummus and shwarma place on Melrose to two cutting-edge food-movement temples in Venice.

Putting a declaration on a menu or a Web site about soul and spirit is one thing, but at Ta-eem you come face to face with the owner who embodies all that. At the end of the day, food alone doesn’t feed us — people do. And it is their spirit that inspires, moves, touches our own.

First, Kraizberger really can cook. The shwarma is crisp-edged, dripping with fat and onion. It’s the best shwarma I’ve had in Los Angeles, no question. The hummus is creamy, fresh and smooth, a foil for spicier dishes. The falafel is green with cilantro and parsley, and the matbucha, the Moroccan salad of cooked-down tomato and pepper — sweet and hot and irresistible.

But there’s also something about this man. Feeding people is clearly a service of devotion for him. You see it in the way he treats his customers, the way he talks to his staff, the stories he tells. 

Kraizberger stands just inside the glass window, calling orders, shaving shwarma, frying falafel. He wears a large Bukharan-style kippah embroidered with the words of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. He greets every soul who enters. When you leave and say, “See you later,” he will stop what he’s doing, look at you — a stranger — and say, “I miss you already.”

The second time I dropped by, I asked him to sit with me outside to talk. He lit a cigarette — we were a good 13 miles from Café Gratitude, so why not? Kraizberger is from Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv. He’d worked in restaurants from the time he was 12 — “School wasn’t for me, so I worked” — and opened his own beachside cafe, Sea Palace, at 21.

He came to Los Angeles 23 years ago, thinking he could escape the food business. He started a successful car dealership, which he ran until a series of health and financial reversals left him sick and destitute.

At that point he found the spot for Ta-eem, in a place where many restaurants before had failed. 

Kraizberger told me that the bad luck started here, too, when a passer-by gave him a black-and-white photo of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, which Kraizberger gave away.

“Everything went very bad,” he told me. “Like you have a curse that you don’t believe. When I started this place, the problems started.”

Two years passed. “Two years of agony.” Then the same guy came back — and he gave Kraizberger another picture of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. This time Kraizberger hung the portrait in his restaurant. 

Ever since, he has been a success.

“As much as it’s true what I’m telling you, this story,” Kraizberger said, “it’s something the human nature cannot understand. That means he watched over me, and Rebbe Nachman. They saved my life.”

Talk about Café Gratitude.

Kraizberger finished his cigarette and his story, and I my Turkish coffee. I mentioned to him then that much of his food happened to be vegan, which is all the rage these days.

“Vegan!” he said. “Where do you think Tobey Maguire gets his matbucha? He can eat anywhere, but when he’s in town, either he comes here or I make a delivery to Sony. Spider-Man, I swear my friend, he’s addicted to matbucha.”

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January 30, 2013 | 2:43 pm

Wise Sons: Inside ‘New Deli’

Posted by Rob Eshman

The pastrami smoker at San Francisco’s Wise Sons delicatessen sits wedged between a short, wooden prep counter and a window facing Mission Street. It is tall and boxy and could easily appear, to those of us who don’t come across pastrami smokers very often, to be either a small refrigerator or, perhaps, a homemade time machine.

Out of that box comes a supple hunk of peppery cured meat, which a young man sporting two arms full of tattoos carves into a row of pinkish-red slices, each crusted in pepper and cure. Using his hands and the blade of his knife, he nestles the slices between two pieces of rye bread, halves the sandwich and sets it on a plate, with a pickle.

The pastrami at Wise Sons is home-cured. That rye bread? Made earlier that morning on the very same counter (by day, a Hobart mixer the size of a bar mitzvah boy is pushed into a corner by the door). The chefs pickle their own pickles, have their lox cured and smoked nearby to their specification, bake their own rich chocolate babkas and, of course, roast the chicken and vegetables that will bubble away in their giant cauldrons of amber-colored soup.   

For generations, this is what every neighborhood deli did, and Wise Sons is finding a way to do it again. The whole place, truth be told, is a kind of time machine.

My family went there for Sunday brunch earlier this month. It’s a chaotic experience. The smell of smoked meat, chicken soup and rye embraces you like a steam sauna the instant you step inside, and the sound of a dozen frantic conversations, the shouts of the counter help and the clattering of dishes drown out your inner peace. You know you’re in a deli.

Wise Sons in San Francisco. Photo by Jay Firestone 

It’s a small place, smaller than the coffee shops and used-clothing stores that long ago began to gentrify San Francisco’s largely Hispanic Mission District. You order at a high counter — the cooks, kitchen and food are all behind it — and sit at scrunched-together tables. One wall is covered with old photos of the owners’ very Jewish-looking relatives — centuries of Beckermans, Solomons and Blooms, all looking down on you, hungry and loving. Another wall is plastered with pages from a now-defunct, Orthodox Yiddish weekly, Das Edisha Vert. The black-hatted rabbis in the photos must feel eternally taunted as they overlook plate after plate of ideal renditions of their favorite foods — none of it certified kosher. 

It was 11 a.m., but so what: We ordered the chicken soup with a matzah ball; a pastrami sandwich, a 4-by-4-inch square of noodle kugel; the L.E.O. (lox, eggs and caramelized onion) with a toasted, and home-baked, bialy; a plate of pastrami-scrambled eggs; coleslaw; an egg cream; coffee; and something called vegetable hash — caramelized onions, carrots, potatoes and Brussels sprouts topped with two fried farmers-market eggs.

I’ve now eaten at several of the country’s new-wave delis, where the food harks back to circa 1902 Lower East Side but is channeled through very modern locavore, ethically sourced sensibilities. Wise Sons stands out as the best. The pastrami has the melty tenderness of Langer’s with a beefier, richer flavor. The lox was lean and wild, and the kugel was soft as pudding. That homemade bialy could have come off an Orchard Street pushcart.

I cornered Leo Beckerman, who is the co-chef and co-owner of Wise Sons, along with his friend Evan Bloom. They met in 2003 as students at UC Berkeley, where they once threw a barbecue for 250 students at the Hillel House.

I’ve met a lot of deli owners in my time, and not one of them looks like Leo, who sports a thin hoop earring in each ear, a rasta nest of hair gathered up in a headscarf and a dreamy look in his eyes. Maybe in 20 years he’ll be paunched out, balding, swallowing Tums from the bottle and snapping at the counter help, but for now, he looks as satisfied as a Peace Corps volunteer watching the villagers eat their first successful crop.

Beckerman grew up in Los Angeles, attended the Oakwood School in North Hollywood and worked in the nonprofit world before his forays into cooking with Bloom led to Wise Sons.

“I just wanted a good pastrami,” he told me.

The two used family recipes, Joan Nathan’s cookbooks, and a lot of trial and error to come up with their menu. “No single recipe survived intact,” Beckerman said.

Wise Sons’ L.E.O. (lox, eggs and caramelized onions) with a toasted bialy. Photo by Rob Eshman

Even though his favorite L.A. deli is Brent’s, with its massive dining room and unlimited choices, Beckerman said, where he sees most delis fail is by offering too many mediocre choices in too big a room. That certainly seems to be what finished off the once-beloved Junior’s on Westwood Boulevard. So, I asked Beckerman, why not bring Wise Sons back home?

“I would love to open a deli in L.A.,” he said.

We talked about new-wave delis, and I pointed out that they tend to fall into two categories: the kind that tries to redefine, or update, the classics, stuffing their knishes with duck confit or wrapping their matzah balls in bacon. Then there’s the kind that tries to produce idealized versions, using great, local, sustainable ingredients — the way we should be eating.  At Wise Sons, the coffee, for instance, is served from the kind of giant metal tank you’d see at Camp Ramah, but its label reads “Bolivia Cenaproc,” and it is dark, fair-traded and delicious.

That’s what Wise Sons aspires to — old-fashioned food for the future — as if that pastrami smoker/time machine really could take us all backward and forward, to a past where Beckerman’s relatives ate pickles from a barrel, and to a future where their great-great-grandchildren can enjoy the same great pickles, made from the harvest of some local farms.

At Wise Sons, the time machine is working.

---

Rob Eshman is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Journal. You can follow his food writing at jewishjournal.com/foodaism and on Twitter @foodaism.

1 Comments — Leave your comment

January 29, 2013 | 12:57 pm

Wise Sons. Delicatessen in San Francisco

Posted by Rob Eshman

This column will be part of our cover story Thursday on why the New Wave deli bandwagon seems to be passing LA by. This sidebar is about my visit to Wise Sons Delicatessen in San Francisco:

The pastrami smoker at San Francisco’s Wise Sons delicatessen sits wedged between a short, wooden prep counter and a window facing Mission Street.  It is tall and boxy and could easily appear, to those of us who don’t come across pastrami smokers very often, to be either a small refrigerator or, perhaps, a homemade time machine.

Out of that box comes a supple hunk of peppery cured meat, which a young man sporting two arms full of tattoos carves into a row of pinkish red slices, each crusted in pepper and cure.  Using his hands and the blade of his knife, he nestles the slices between two pieces of rye bread, halves the sandwich and sets it on a plate, with a pickle.

The pastrami at Wise Sons is home-cured. That rye bread?  Made earlier that morning on the very same counter (by day, a Hobart mixer the size of a bar mitzvah boy is pushed into a corner by the door). The chefs pickle their own pickles, have their lox cured and smoked nearby to their specification, bake their own rich chocolate babkes and, of course, roast the chicken and vegetables that will bubble away in their giant cauldrons of amber-colored soup.  

For generations, this is what every neighborhood deli did, and Wise Sons is finding a way to do it again.   The whole place, truth be told, is a kind of time machine.

My family went there for Sunday brunch earlier this month.  It’s a chaotic experience. The smell of smoked meat, chicken soup and rye embraces you like a steam sauna the instant you step inside, and the sound of a dozen frantic conversations, the shouts of the counter help and the clattering of dishes drown out your inner peace.  You know you’re in a deli.

It’s a small place, smaller than the coffee shops and used-clothing stores that long ago began to gentrify San Francicso’s largely Hispanic Mission District.  You order at a high counter—the cooks, kitchen and food are all behind it—and sit at scrunched-together tables. One wall is covered with old photos of the owners’ very Jewish-looking relatives -- centuries of Beckermans, Solomons and Blooms, all looking down on you, hungry and loving.  Another wall is plastered with pages from a now-defunct, Orthodox Yiddish weekly, Das Edisha Vert.  The black-hatted rabbis in the photos must be eternally taunted as they overlook plate after plate of ideal renditions of their favorite foods -- none of it certified kosher.  

It was 11 a.m., but so what: We ordered the chicken soup with a matzah ball, a pastrami sandwich, a four-by-four square of noodle kugel, the L.E.O. (lox, eggs and caramelized onion, with a toasted, and home-baked, bialy), a plate of pastrami-scrambled eggs, coleslaw, an egg cream, coffee and something called vegetable hash -- caramelized onions, carrots, potatoes and brussel sprouts topped with two fried farmers-market eggs.

I’ve now eaten at several of the country’s new-wave delis, where the food harks back to the 19th-century Lower East Side but is channeled through very modern locavore, ethically-sourced sensibilities.   Wise Sons stands out as among the best.   The pastrami has the melty tenderness of Langers with a beefier, richer flavor. The lox was lean and wild, and the kugel was soft as pudding. That homemade bialy could have come off an Orchard Street  pushcart.

I cornered Leo  Beckerman. who is the co-chef and co-owner of Wise Sons, along with his friend Evan Bloom.  They met as UC Berkeley students in 2003, where they once threw a barbeque for 250 students at the Hillel House.

I’ve met a lot of deli owners in my time, and not one of them looks like Leo, who sports a thin hoop earring in each ear, a rasta nest of hair gathered up in a headscarf, and a dreamy look in his eyes.    Maybe in 20 years he’ll be paunched out, balding, swallowing Tums from the bottle and snapping at the counter help, but for now he looks as satisfied as a Peace Corp volunteer watching the villagers eat their first successful crop.

Beckerman grew up in Los Angeles, attended the Oakwood School in North Hollywood and worked in the nonprofit world before his forays into cooking with Bloom led to Wise Sons.

“I just wanted a good pastrami,” he told me.

The two used family recipes, Joan Nathan’s cookbooks and a lot of trial and error to come up with their menu.  “No single recipe survived intact,” Beckerman said.

Even though his favorite L.A. deli is Brent’s, with its massive dining room and unlimited choices, Beckerman said where he sees most delis fail is by offering too many mediocre choices in too big a room.  That certainly seems to be what finished off the once-beloved Junior’s on Westwood Boulevard.  Why not bring Wise Sons back home?, I asked Beckerman.

“I would love to open a deli in L.A.,” he said.

We talked about new-wave deli food, and I pointed out that they tend to fall into two general categories: the kind that tries to redefine, or update, the classics, stuffing their knishes with duck confit or wrapping their matzah balls in bacon. Then there’s the kind that tries to produce idealized versions, using great, local, sustainable ingredients—the way we should be eating.  Wise Sons is a redefiner.  The coffee, for instance, is served from the kind of giant metal tank you’d see at Camp Ramah, but its label reads “Bolivia Cenaproc,” and it is dark, fair-traded and delicious.

That’s what Wise Sons aspires to old-fashioned food for the future -- as if that pastrami smoker/time machine really could take us all backward and forward, to a past where Beckerman’s relatives ate pickles from a barrel, and to a future where their great-great-grandchildren can enjoy the same great pickles, made from the harvest of some local farms.

At Wise Sons, the time machine is working.

Follow me on Twitter @foodaism.

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October 17, 2012 | 3:00 pm

Meme’s Anise Tea Biscuits [RECIPE]

Posted by Rob Eshman

A few weeks ago, I spent Shabbat evening at David Suissa’s house. His mother, Suzanne, who was visiting from Montreal, cooked.

At the end of the perfect Moroccan-Jewish festive dinner came a plate of galettes — anise-scented tea biscuits. Light, not too sweet — perfect for coffee. For breakfast. For the office. I asked her to teach me how to make them.

“Mais oui,” she said.

My cooking lesson with Suzanne was set for 12 p.m. I arrived at 12 p.m. She swung open the door, kissed me on both cheeks, then hurried back to the kitchen.

“You know when a Moroccan says 12 p.m.,” she said, “he comes at 1.”

She was happy to welcome me into David’s Beverlywood home, but too busy to stay in one place for more than a second. In a couple of days, her grandson was to be wed, and Suzanne was in the midst of preparing food for a pre-wedding henna ceremony. Moroccan meat pastries, chicken, meat, vegetables, salads —for 100 people.

Everyone calls Suzanne “Meme”— Meh-meh — an endearment for Mama. She is 79 years old. Family, food and work, in that order, have defined her life. As David wrote in the Jewish Journal in 2007: 

“... here in her tiny kitchen in Montreal, these were my childhood memories. Memories of a small apartment kitchen where Meme cooked for 100 people who came for my brother Samy’s bar mitzvah, in 1967. Memories of seders, Shabbat meals, hot soups on winter nights, summer picnics, afternoon snacks — big meals, small meals or spectacular meals, always coming out of tiny kitchens.”

Meme insisted I must eat before my cooking lesson. It was noon, after all. Between prepping dinner for 100 guests and giving me a cooking lesson, she made me lunch: pureed red lentil soup, spiced with onion and cumin; a grilled chicken paillard; a salad of carrot, celery and cilantro; another salad with smoked roasted eggplant.

She asked if I’d like a glass of wine — I said, “Of course.” When I started to reach for a water glass, Meme rushed over and replaced it with a proper wine glass.

“No, no, no, no,” she said.

Galettes is a simple recipe; then again, so is pasta, so is bread, so is cheese. The great foods of the world rely not on mysterious recipes or ingredients, but on technique. I’m a confident cook, and I can certainly follow a recipe, but I can really learn to cook a great dish only by watching someone who excels at it —who loves it — do it. 

That’s why I didn’t simply ask Meme for her galette recipe — it’s just a list of ingredients. I wanted to watch her make it. That takes time, but skill and touch and taste and love — the key ingredients to great food— are only revealed with time. Before we lose the generation that knows these recipes — whether in the hill towns of Puglia or on the streets of Beverlywood — we need to preserve them on tape. Great food is not a question of what, but how.

Meme started by mixing eggs, sugar and oil. (“I always check my eggs,” Meme said, as she cracked each into a small dish before adding it to the mixing bowl.)

She added more anise seed than you’ve bought in your life, along with flour and baking powder. She kneaded it all in a KitchenAid mixer.

“My mother put everything in like this, all at once, and mixed with her hands,” Meme said.

When the mass had come together and was smooth, she rolled it out by hand on a lightly floured surface — at home she uses an electric pasta machine for this — then she used a dough docker to poke the signature holes in the dough. Afterward, she used a ruffled rolling cutter to shape the final biscuits.

When I asked to try my hand at rolling, docking and cutting, I tossed a small scrap of dough, no bigger than a Nicoise olive, toward the trash. Meme looked at me like I’d just driven a school bus full of children off a cliff.

“I don’t throw anything away, Rob!” Meme said.

I made a video of her until my iPhone battery died, so you can see what I saw. If doing something 10,000 times makes you an expert — as they say — you’ll be watching a woman who has made tens of thousands of galettes. Pay attention.

Then, after an hour, I had to leave. The thing about Meme’s hospitality is I felt as bad for coming right on time as I did for leaving when I said I had to. The cookies were still in the oven. She had made me lunch and given me the gift of this lesson.

Another double kiss, and I was gone, but not before Meme had given me a dozen hot galettes from the first batch for the office.

On the way back to work. I ate them all.

Merci, Meme.

MEME SUISSA’S GALETTES

4 eggs

1 cup sugar

1 cup vegetable oil

1 cup water

6  1/2 cups flour

2 tablespoons baking powder

1 cup anise seeds

Beat first four ingredients together in bowl.

Add the rest of the ingredients, then mix by hand or with a sturdy spoon until a stiff dough comes together. Put the dough in the bowl of a KitchenAid mixer and use dough hook to knead at low speed for three minutes.

Divide the dough into quarters. Roll out to 1/8-inch thickness. Pierce with dough docker, then cut into 1 1/2-by-2 inch rectangles with a ruffle-edged cutter.

Place the cookies, separated slightly, on a Silpat- or parchment-lined cookie sheet.

Bake in preheated 350 F oven for 8 to 10  minutes, until just brown. Halfway through baking time, switch pans (upper to lower rack, and vice versa) for even baking.

Makes about 64 cookies. 

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October 11, 2012 | 10:47 pm

Meme Suissa’s Anise Tea Biscuits [VIDEO RECIPE]

Posted by Rob Eshman

A few weeks ago I spent Shabbat evening at David Suissa’s house.  His mother Suzanne, visiting from Montreal, cooked.

At the end of the perfect Morroccan Jewish festive dinner came a plate of galettes—anise-scented tea biscuits.  Light, not too sweet—perfect for coffee. For breakfast. For the office.  I asked her to teach me how to make them.

“Mais oui,” she said.

My cooking lesson with Suzanne was set for 12 pm.    I arrived at 12 pm.  She swung open the door, kissed me on both cheeks, then hurried back to the kitchen.

“You know when a Moroccan says 12 pm,” she said,  “they come at 1.”

She was happy to welcome me into David’s Beverlywood home, but too busy to stay in one place for more than a second.  In a couple of days her grandson was to be wed, and Suzanne was in the midst  of preparing food for a pre-wedding henna ceremony.  Moroccan meat pastries, chicken, meat, vegetables, salads—for 100 people.

Everyone calls Suzanne “Meme”-- Meh-meh—an endearment for Mama. She is 79 years old.  Family, food and work, in that order, have defined her life.  As David wrote in the Jewish Journal in 2007:  

...here in her tiny kitchen in Montreal, these were my childhood memories. Memories of a small apartment kitchen where Meme cooked for 100 people who came for my brother Samy's bar mitzvah, in 1967. Memories of seders, Shabbat meals, hot soups on winter nights, summer picnics, afternoon snacks -- big meals, small meals or spectacular meals, always coming out of tiny kitchens.

Meme stopped the preparations to make me lunch, which she insisted I must eat before my cooking lesson. It was noon, after all. Between prepping dinner for 100 guests and giving me a cooking lesson, she made me lunch: pureed red lentil soup, spiced with onion and cumin, a grilled chicken paillard, a salad of carrot, celery and cilantro, another salad with smoked roasted eggplant. 

She asked if I’d like a glass of wine—I said of course.  When I started to reach for a water glass, Meme rushed over and replaced it with a proper wine glass. 

“No no no no,” she said.

Galettes is a simple recipe, then again, so is pasta, so is bread, so is cheese. The great foods of the world rely not on mysterious recipes or ingredients, but on technique.  I’m a confident cook, and I can certainly follow a recipe, but I can only really learn to cook a great dish by watching someone who excels at it—who loves it—do it. 

That’s why I didn’t simply ask Meme for her galette recipe—it’s just a list of ingredients.  I asked to watch her make it.  That takes time, but skill and touch and taste and love—the key ingredients to great food, are only revealed in time.  Before we lose the generation that knows these recipes—whether in the hill towns of Puglia or the streets of Beverlywood—we need to preserve them on tape.  Great food is not a question of what, but how.

Meme started by mixing eggs, sugar and oil.  (“I always check my eggs,” Meme said, as she cracked each into a small dish before adding it to the mixing bowl.)

She added more anise seed than you’ve bought in your life, along with flower and baking soda.  She kneaded it all in a KitchenAid mixer.  

“My mother put everything in like this all at once and mixed with her hands,” Meme said.  She told me her mother was also an excellent cook. When Meme told me one of her favoirte dishes from Casablanca was a salad of green peppers, tomatoes and argan oil, I promised to send her argan oil, which I said was now becoming popular in LA.

"Really!" she said-- but I'm not sure she believed me.

When the mass had come together and was smooth, she rolled it out by hand on a lightly floured surface—at home she uses an electric pasta machine for this—then she used a dough docker to poke the signature holes in the dough.  Afterwards she used a ruffled rolling cutter to shape the final biscuits.

When I asked to try my hand at rolling,  docking and cutting, I tossed a small scrap of dough, no bigger than a Nicoise olive, toward the trash.  Meme looked at me like I just drove a school bus full of children off a cliff.

“I don’t throw anything away Rob!” Meme said.

I took a video until my iPhone battery died, so you can see what I saw.  If doing something 10,000 times makes you an expert—so they say—you’re watching a woman who has made tens of thousands of galettes. Pay  attention.

Then, after an hour,  I had to leave.  The thing about Meme’s hospitality is I felt as bad for coming right on time as I did for leaving when I said I had to.  The cookies were still in the oven.  She had made me lunch and given me the gift of this lesson.

Another double kiss and I was gone, but not before Meme gave me a dozen hot galettes from the first batch.  

I ate them in the car on the way back to work.

Merci, Meme.

[RECIPE]

Meme Suissa’s Galettes

INGEDIENTS
4 eggs
1 c. sugar
1 c. vegetable oil
1 c. water
6 ½ c. flour, approximately
2 T. baking powder
1 c. anise seeds

Beat the first four ingredients together in bowl.

Add the rest of the ingredients, then mix by hand or with a sturdy spoon until a stiff dough comes together.  Put in a KitchenAid and use a dough hook to knead at low speed for three minutes. ( If you don't have a KitchenAid, you can knead by hand.  Why not start by putting all the ingredients in the KitchenAid?  Because you need to use your hands to feel when the dough has come together properly. Plus it's more fun.)

Divide the dough into quarters.  Roll each quarter out to 1/8 inch thickness. (At home in Montreal, Meme divides the dough into smaller pieces and rolls it through the electric pasta machine attachment on her KitchenAid.) Pierce with a dough docker, then cut into 1 ½ inch by 2 inch rectangles with a ruffle-edged cutter.

Place the cookies on Silpat- or parchment-lined cookie sheet, slightly separated.

Bake in a 350 degree oven for 8 to 10  minutes, until just brown. Switch pans for even cooking.

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October 10, 2012 | 4:51 pm

Meme Suissa’s Moroccan Galettes [VIDEO]

Posted by Rob Eshman

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October 9, 2012 | 10:36 pm

The New York Times Kosher Los Angeles Article Is…Wrong

Posted by Rob Eshman

There are about 70 kosher restaurants in Los Angeles. 

The New York Times article on kosher dining in Los Angeles mentions four of them.  Why?  Who knows?  Maybe the writer, Jennifer Medina, had a limited expense account.  Maybe she doesn’t drive, so she could only go to the places within a few blocks (let’s say she has uncomfortable shoes, too).  Maybe the New York Times figures, Hey, it’s LA, who cares?

The article, which appears in the Oct. 10, 2012, Dining & Wine section, is entitled, “Los Angeles Kosher: Beyond Corned Beef and a Knish.” You might assume what follows is a definitive, Times-esque journey through, well, kosher Los Angeles.

Nope.

We learn about Mexikosher—we spend a lot of time at Mexikosher. Katsuji Tanabe’s fusion of Mexican, kosher and a bit of Asian cuisine really does stand out.  I long ago wrote that in a just world Tanabe's habanero orange salsa would replace ketchup. The Mexico City born non-Jewish Tanabe, who first learned kosher cooking at Shilo's, is a genuine kosher star.

Medina smartly, rightly singles him out.  She also enjoys Kabab Mahaleh, an authentic if standard Persian kebab house, Haifa, a stalwart Israeli joint, and a newish place called Beverly Hills Thai.

The way she justifies such a short list is by making the claim that LA’s kosher restaurant mirrors its exceptional ethnic dining scene.

Hmm.  Are there Mexican kosher restaurants in New York?  Four. Are there Thai kosher restaurants in New York? Two.  Persian kosher in New York?  At least six, including the renowned Colbeh.  How do I know Colbeh is renowned?  Because I read about it in the New York Times.  
I won’t even bother asking how an Israeli place like Haifa, which does have good food, qualifies as ethnic in the context of kosher.

So, if a handful of ethnic kosher restaurants does not set LA’s kosher dining scene apart from New York’s, or any other city’s, what does?

Restlessness.

Places come and go faster than a low-rated sitcom.  A place like La Seine, headed by a tattooed Top Chef, featuring pitch-perfect cocktails, sushi, sous vide short ribs and Saturday night jazz—flared up and flamed out in a year. 

Prime Grill, which defines high-end kosher in Manhattan, crashed and burned here.  LA’s equivalent of Prime Grill, where the kosher mover and shakers meet, is Pat’s—dependable, haimish, not New York, not really even LA.

In what other Jewish city in the world will Steven Spielberg’s mother seat you at your table, as Leah Adler does at her kosher dairy restaurant Milky Way?  How's the food?  Did I mention Leah Adler is  Steven Spielberg’s mother?

Then there’s Thursday nights at Bocca in Encino, where the Israelis cut loose with dancing and wine  and abandon—it’s like a scene from Tony and Tina’s Chuppah.

Go to GotKosher on Pico for an authentic Tunsian tuna sandwich—along with the (non-kosher) Tuna Conserva Sandwich  at GTA on Abbot Kinney, it's  among the best tuna sandwiches in town. And ask owner Alain Cohen to shave some of his stash of kosher bottarga on your pasta.  

Come on NYT.  "Kosher in LA?" You didn't even get past the appetizers. There’s Afshan downtown, whose Persian food meets the discriminating palates of the near-100 percent Iranian clientele at the shamata and jewelry markets.  The kosher Subway came and went, along with its $9 meatball sub, but Nagila Pizza has now fed generations of loud, rambunctious families.  There’s the outdoor, impromptu kosher hot dog grillers on Pico Blvd. after Shabbat, with their whiff of beef and danger, and there’s Jeff’s Gourmet Sausage, where you can get home-cured sausages from duck to goose.  Jeff’s is across from Doheny Meats—and at both you can buy air-dried beef strips—biltong—as good as in Jo’berg, or so my South African friends tell me.

The vegan rabbis I know—a larger number than you’d think, even for LA--  take their meetings at one of two Real Food Daily restaurants, both kosher. Sit long enough at the outdoor tables at Delice Cafe, where Julien turns out Parisian-level pastries and sandwiches, and you'll soon see half the people you meant to call that day. And for sheer culture clash, seeing the Chabadniks serve the bikini-clad surfer babes at the Fish Grill in Malibu on Pacific Coast Highway—now that’s a New York Times story and a sitcom.

And of course—of course—Tierra Sur.  It's in Oxnard, but a creature of the LA kosher consumer market.  It’s former chef (and current advisor) Todd Aarons left behind a legacy of locally-sourced, seasonal, simple California Mediterranean food, much of it made in an outdoor wood-fired oven. 

The main criticism I have of kosher restaurants in LA is that more don’t aspire to—or the city’s kosher diners won’t support—more places that care as much about ingredients, and cooking, and service, as Tierra Sur.   Inshallah.

The point is kosher dining in LA is quirky and dynamic—much like the city’s Jews.

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