Brighton Beach, home to many Russian Jews but no kosher Russian restaurants (Photo by japp1967, Creative Commons license)
“How is it that a city like New York would not have a kosher Russian restaurant?” Julie Masis asks in a piece for The Forward. There’s kosher sushi, kosher Chinese food, and kosher restaurants serving food from former Soviet countries, she writes. But what about the food of Jews from Russia and Ukraine? Masis turns to managers and owners of Russian restaurants for answers.
Immigrants from the Soviet republics don’t care about kosher food, said Yuri Uspensky. The manager of the Russian restaurant National Restaurant and Night Club in Brighton Beach elaborated:
“There used to be kosher fish stores (in the neighborhood), but they all closed down because people who come from the USSR never cared about kosher food. If the kosher fish stores closed, what’s the point of opening a kosher restaurant?”
Yaakov Ryvkin, the general manager of the Onegin Russian, who himself is Jewish and does not keep kosher, expressed similar comments. He added that Russian food isn’t the best cuisine to make kosher:
“Russian food is very pork-based, and milk and meat is always mixed,” Ryvkin said. “It’s easier to make Thai food or Asian food kosher than to make Russian food kosher.”
The owner of the Caspiy Russian restaurant gave an example of how Russian food isn’t made to be kosher using pelmeni – Russian dumplings with sour cream. Read what he said, and the “financial constraints” cited by Russian-Jewish businessmen as to why their restaurants haven’t gone kosher, in the full story at The Forward.