And I Thought It Was A Kosher Restaurant

There's a great food story about a Jewish restaurant in Paris (it's booked til February so stop rushing for a flight).

Daniel Rose's restaurant. Daniel's from Chicago (my next-door neighbor here in Shiloh, Dov Berkovits, is from Chicago).

Spring.

But then I got to this paragraph:

As he prepared snails that would be encased with tiny diced tomatoes and herbs in Tunisian brik pastry, then deep-fried and brushed with a citron-cardamom confiture, he said that for Hanukkah, the snails could be swapped for fresh chicken livers. Accompanying the snail dish would be a bright yellow squash soup with diced apples, pomegranate seeds and white coco beans. The soup, he thought, could stay the same, only substituting soy milk for goat milk.

Oops. That's not too kosher, not kosher at all.

And then this:

“Paris is such a Jewish city,” Mr. Rose said, but that realization dawned on him only after he had lived here for a while and had started noticing, for example, how many doors with mezuzas he passed on his way to the market.

“My landlord is Jewish, my neighbors are Jewish and it is safe territory in this neighborhood,” he said. When his neighbors learned he was Jewish, he said, they began to open up to him. The chocolate maker invited him for Passover, and chided him for not dating Jewish girls. “I guess I am on their Jewdar,” he said.

His next-door neighbor, a Moroccan immigrant who is a wedding videographer, once suggested that Mr. Rose open a kosher restaurant, promising that he would provide the customers. “My neighbors tell me that all the time,” Mr. Rose said. “But I would only want to do it if it were a fish restaurant where we wouldn’t have to substitute margarine for real butter. Then we could have good, delicious desserts.”

Daniel, that next-door neighbor is a smart person. You'll be doing better if you go kosher.