A festivus for the kosher eaters in us
Filed under: Business, Food, General, Religion
Running parallel to the kosher wine revolution (which has taught us over the past 15 years or so that it doesn’t have to be grape cough syrup to be rabbinically approved) has been the kosher food revolution (which has taught us over the past 10 years or so that it doesn’t have to be boiled chicken necks to be rabbinically approved). Much has been written about the kosher gourmet scene in various cities, and as affluence and religious observance become decreasingly exclusive concepts, the scene has only flourished.
Case in point with the Chef Eats Kosher Festival, already underway at 40 restaurants all over Israel and running through Thursday. Part co-opted marketing campaign, part celebration of a niche business community’s renaissance, and part charity drive (more on this below), Chef Eats Kosher is the brainchild of production company One Mouth. In a statement released through their publicity agents, One Mouth principles Tal Nechemia and Eran Zingler summed up the wave they’re riding:
“In recent years, we’ve seen a steady increase in crowds of people looking for experiences going out that are high-quality yet kosher. Tens of thousands came to the first kosher festival in Petach Tikva that we put on this summer, and the success of the Chef Eats Kosher Festivals in recent years has encouraged us to bring it back….”
The main draw to this fourth incarnation of Chef Eats Kosher is its affordability: When else can one enjoy a specialty three-course meal at a top-tier (well, most of them are top-tier, anyway – Jerusalem’s only participating eatery is, strangely, the local branch of the Yotvata café) restaurant for the extremely affordable price of NIS 84?
And at every Chef Eats Kosher-participating table are envelopes for donations to Table to Table, a Ra’anana-based organization which rescues leftovers from restaurants and events and serves them to the needy. The Table to Table-Chef Eats Kosher charity drive alone aims to help some 5000 schoolchildren, although the envelopes on the tables are for cash donations.
A partial list of 2008′s Chef Eats Kosher restaurants appears in English, along with some recommendations, here, while the full, Hebrew-only list can be seen here.
Photo courtesy Dan Peretz.
Edgy thespian workshop
Run by Tel Aviv University’s prestigious Theater Department, the SmallStage festival kicks its seventh year of operations off this Sunday for five days of fringe drama performances.
The festival is constituted of productions headed by those studying in or otherwise associated with the department, which is the country’s largest and arguably most respected drama program. Many of its alumni have moved on to become among the elite in Israeli theater and entertainment, including the festival’s founder, Lilach Dekel-Avneri, who now works with the Tmuna troupe.
Including staged plays as well as off-stage dramatic “happenings,” the festival itself maintains a decidedly fringe vibe thanks to the hunger and integrity of its participants, but also thanks to strict guidelines that all shows stick to low spending budgets, high standards of edgy creativity and a crisp 50-minute duration ceiling.
This year’s festival has been largely conceived by artistic director Liron Libskind, currently working on his master’s degree in theater. Among the intriguing performance titles are Three Small Silences (pictured), She and Birdman.
You Day
The anticipation and excitement began already last week, even while we were celebrating Sukkot – an exciting enough event on its own, if you ask me. But when that letter came, we just started counting down the days – and then the hours – to Sunday.
Why all the excitement? You Day! 
So what’s You Day, you ask? Only the best day of the year to go shopping! You Day is the reward for us loyal customers who frequent a local “big box” supermarket all year, buying groceries with their You Card branded Diner’s Club debit card. The previous two times the store ran You Day, there were great bargains to be had – so much so that by the time me and my Significant Other arrived, they were out of half the sale items!
Well, this time we weren’t going to lose out – so bright and early on Sunday morning, we shlepped down to the store to take advantage of the bargains. And what bargains they were! Would you believe half-price – on a whole bunch of stuff we actually use! And unlike the usual requirement to get deals at this store, there was no minimum purchase of non-sale items required. Just free and easy shopping for a whole bunch of half price items! The only limitation – you could purchase just two of each item. Fair enough – and for us, not a problem, since my SO had her own You Card. So we were able to get four of each item!
Now, I’m no fool; I know how sales work (in Israel, the U.S., or anywhere). Loyalty program or not, nobody is giving away anything for half price. So you expect a little pre-sale price inflation, where the store raises the price on items and puts them back “on sale” – so you end up saving less than you expect. And You Day prices were no different, although I have to say some of them were genuine bargains (except for the instant coffee, where they basically doubled the price, so you would end up paying the “normal” price in the deal).
And so we shopped. And shopped some more. And when it was all over, we took our purchases up to the cash register, and watched with great satisfaction as the printout listed an item, a price – and a 50% discount!
There’s a theory about grocery shopping that says how sales and bargains, no matter how good they are, are basically a consumerist ripoff. Just walking into the big supermarket with the bargains means you’re going to end up spending more than you planned; far better to do your shopping at the not so cheap and much more limited neighborhood makolet (grocery store). The bigger the bargains, the more you end up spending, buying stuff you don’t really need.
But does that theory really apply when almost all the items in your shopping cart are half price? Did we buy items we didn’t need? I’ll admit it; we bought four of almost all the sale items, including things we didn’t buy on a usual basis (because they’re usually too expensive!). So, in one sense, it was a good day for bargains – but on the other hand, the makolet would have helped keep spending down. I guess the strategy works – even with all the bargains, we still spent nearly 1,000 shekels between the two of us, the second highest amount we have ever spent in any “walk down the aisle” at a supermarket!
I heart Sukkot.
Sukkot is by far my favorite holiday. Within an hour of Yom Kippur ending the incessant sounds of banging envelop my neighborhood as nearly everyone, secular and religious erect their sukkot in their backyards and all too often quite precariously on their porches. There are sukkot as far as the eye can see. I bought a small pre-fab sukkah a few years ago that goes up in about 15 minutes with minimal effort – though I haven’t put it up yet – I’m a last minute type of guy.
I cherish this part of the year. We usually get our first rain during Sukkot (though we were trumped by Rosh Hashana this year) and then winter quickly comes rather quickly though there is always a random hot day in November. It’s the closest we have to a spring-like season though it only lasts for a couple of weeks. I took full advantage over the weekend and did a lot of much needed gardening for the first time since June. My lemongrass and lemon tree is out of control so I harvested much of it and gave generously to friends. On Friday night I stuffed about a dozen stalks in the tuchus of a chicken. I highly recommend this in in lieu of using lemon. You get the delicious lemon flavor without the acidity. My lemons are better suited for lemonade.
I am far from a religious man but I for some reason I can’t explain I feel very connected to this holiday. Perhaps it is my love of the land married with the cultural observance of this holiday. Perhaps it is the vision of unity. The Israeli people (or should I say Jewish) experience unity in both tragedy and celebrations and unfortunately not too not much in between. But that’s ok, because on Sukkot it all comes together – at least for me.
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