Food coverage is supported by a generous donation from Susan and Moses Libitzky.
It’s not every personal chef or caterer who got their start in a parking lot outside a Grateful Dead show. But Shoshana Klein, who once sold egg rolls to cover the cost of a concert ticket, has been cooking since then.
“Feeding people is my love language,” said Klein, 60. “I’m going to keep doing this until I just can’t.”
It was back when she was a kid attending Camp JCA Shalom in Southern California that Klein was turned on to the Grateful Dead. Even before she finished high school, she and her sister started selling burritos, bagels and egg rolls in parking lots before and after Dead concerts.
Today she’s the woman behind the two-decade-old personal chef and catering business in the East Bay called Shoshana’s Kitchen. The Albany resident is also a licensed clinical social worker, who has treated trauma survivors, including undocumented immigrants.
Klein, who grew up in Los Angeles, acknowledges that she applied to UC Santa Cruz solely for proximity to the Dead scene.
“I wasn’t very grounded then,” said Klein, who earned her bachelor’s degree there in 1990.
She regularly ditched class to go “on tour,” where she’d also sell food.
“I remember finishing papers once in a parking lot,” she said.
Klein also spent three months in Israel, which turned into a year and a half of travel as she visited Turkey, Greece and Egypt, taking cooking classes wherever she went. Gaining this new exposure to cuisines was “mindblowing,” she said.
As a child, she was close with her grandparents, who had immigrated from Hungary and Czechoslovakia before World War II.
“My grandmother’s family had been kosher butchers before they had to leave,” she said. “I loved being in the kitchen with Nana and listening to her stories of how they lived off the land. When you grew up in L.A., that was unheard of.”
Klein’s grandmother adapted Jewish dishes, like stuffed cabbage, for her granddaughter, stuffing the rolls with tofu when Klein turned vegetarian as a teen. That was her love language, Klein said. She also remembers hearing her grandmother’s stories about learning how to ferment cabbage, tomatoes and pickles.
“I learned about gut health and the microbiome — even though we didn’t call it that then — from my grandmother,” she said. “That generational knowledge had been passed down: Your stomach would feel better if you ate that stuff.”
Klein’s knowledge came at the right time. Back in the 1980s, the health food movement was still in its nascent stages. In Santa Cruz, she joined a group of women in a cooperative business called Love Sprouts Kitchen, which sold sprouted hummus and sprouted bread. Around the same time, Klein helped open a cafe in Guatemala, she said, and, somehow, managed to graduate.
While living in Santa Cruz, she also started a catering company called Vegan Palace and began cooking for Apple Computer conferences. When she entered graduate school in social work at UC Berkeley, she quickly realized that working for Apple events could make her enough money in a week to pay her tuition for the year.
“At one point, I talked to my professors and told them, ‘I need to pay for school, and I have this opportunity. Can I put my final papers on pause until after the conference?’ They all said yes, and I was able to pay for school,” she said.
She recalls chatting with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs about food, although she had no idea who he was at the time.
After Klein completed her graduate degree, she continued to cater while she earned the hours of psychotherapy experience required to become a licensed clinical social worker. After she had children, the hours away from home required for catering gigs became less appealing. So she turned to working as a personal chef for a time, cooking healthy dishes for people too busy to prepare meals themselves. She returned to catering when her kids were older.
Today, she caters holiday meals at Berkeley Hillel and events at Urban Adamah, where this reporter ran into her recently at a bar mitzvah.
“I want people to be nourished by my food and feel good in their bodies after eating it,” she said. “I use organic and local as much as possible, and I love it when I see people that I’ve cooked for multiple times and know what they like. One friend used to get so excited whenever he saw my massaged kale Caesar salad. He called it ‘dayenu’ salad because he said he didn’t need anything else.”