When organizers got together to plan this year’s Jewish street fair in Palo Alto, the decision to include cooking demos was a no-brainer. “Food and Jews just go together,” quips Wendy Bernstein Lash, executive director of New Bridges, the organization behind the California Street event.
What Jewish food really is, however, is not as obvious, especially when you ask some of the cooking experts slated for the all-day line-up on Sunday, Oct. 6.
“It’s not even a category anymore,” says Stephanie Gelman, a teacher of pastry arts at Santa Clara’s Mission College and owner of Chef About Town. Southern California food writer and cooking instructor Judy Bart Kancigor agrees. With the exception of such unique Shabbat and holiday items as cholent and matzah, she explains, Jewish food is food from anywhere Jews have lived. “Jewish cooking is either Russian, or German, or South American, or whatever.”
Perhaps no one in the Bay Area is stretching the definition of Jewish cooking more than Metzada Shelef. Meekk, as the Israeli native prefers to be called, is the chef-owner of the recently opened Meekk’s Dinner Tree in Palo Alto, the only kosher vegetarian restaurant on the Peninsula.
Meekk’s menu, which on any given week might include gazpacho Andaluz, Thai vegetable salad, moussaka or tofu Osaka, attests to the chef’s eclectic approach. The energetic chef, who also runs a kosher kitchen in San Jose, says choosing a single favorite ethnic cuisine is “like choosing between your kids.”
Meekk, who in 1998 left a successful catering business in Haifa to come to Silicon Valley with her engineer husband, has kept kosher all her life, but insists she is not religious. “In Israel, you sift the flour, religious or not, because you don’t want to eat worms.” It’s the same principle with checking grains of rice and washing each piece of parsley. “All those things I do, not because I’m religious but because that’s how I was taught to cook.”
A vegetarian since she was 9, she now strictly prohibits what she calls “dead animals” — even smoked salmon — in her restaurant. “If somebody uses fish on my cutting board, I throw that cutting board away,” she says. This zealotry, which has prompted more than one local rabbi to tell Meekk she has her own religion, has also helped earn the rabbis’ trust. “They know how crazy I am about keeping anyone’s rules,” she says. “I’m more crazy than them,” she says half-jokingly.
While some items are vegan and parve, the inclusion of dairy and eggs in other dishes greatly enriches the restaurant’s menu, especially in the selection of baked goods. A cherry tomato salad in a simple but flavorful lemon vinaigrette becomes a complete lunch when rounded out with a buttery boureka, a Turkish pastry with a cheese filling. Meekk’s cheeses, some of which are made on the premises or imported from Israel, contain only kosher vegetarian rennet.
She rents the space from the owners of the former Italian restaurant Joe’s, a site she fell in love with for its herb and vegetable garden and olive trees. “The thing you really, really miss when you’re not in Israel is the scenery. An olive tree makes me cry, and not many things can make me cry. I love the land itself. You see an olive tree, and you just want to give it a hug. So when I saw those olive trees, I thought, ‘Wow, I want this place.'”
But Joe’s, whose menu had included pork tenderloin scaloppine and calamari fritti, had to be thoroughly kashered before it could receive the approval of the mashgiach, the kosher supervisor. The kashering process, which took three days, included sanding down the butcher-block counters and scouring and blow-torching the ovens and stovetops.
Though keeping Meekk’s kosher adds about 25 percent to the cost of doing business, Meekk wouldn’t have it any other way. After all, where else but at Izzy’s Bagels on California Street could locals and their more religious out-of-town relatives eat together? “Or for people from Chabad and the Orthodox Minyan and people from Kol Emeth or Beth Am to sit at the same place and eat. That doesn’t happen, except at Izzy’s, which is an unbelievable place because of that.”
The street festival, too, is a rare place for varied Jews to gather together in one place.
Other chefs demonstrating Jewish recipes throughout the day will be Jewish Bulletin food columnist Louise Fiszer; Gelman and her students from Mission College; local caterer Dottie Yourtz; Joey Altman, host of “Bay Cafe” on KRON/TV and chef of Menlo Park’s Wild Hare restaurant; and food writer Bart Kancigor, who will also be emceeing the demos.