A Kosher Place to Watch the Fightin' Phils

Today is our 30th wedding anniversary. My husband has been having dreams about the steak at Le Marais ever since our New York adventure, and we talked about making a return appearance. We also considered Max and David's, Philadelphia's only fine dining kosher restaurant. But the Phillies are in the playoffs and could clinch the National League title tonight, so we plan to have a late meal at the Expresso Cafe and Sushi Bar (7814 Castor Ave.) and enjoy a dairy meal while we cheer for our team in front of a wide-screen TV that beats what we have at home.

Although baseball isn't owner Sharon Abergel's sport, we're betting that even the Israelis who frequent this clean, well-managed hangout will be watching the Phils tonight. Before the Expresso Cafe opened in 2004, if you were hungry and kept kosher, there was no place to go after 9 p.m. Now, you can get anything from a rich dessert to an omelet until midnight. My only wish is that Sharon would open earlier Sunday morning (he opens at 10 - too late when my girlfriends and I want to gather for breakfast).

Everything at the Expresso Cafe is always fresh. The salads are tasty - no wilted lettuce or over-ripe veggies. My favorite main dishes are the Carpaccio - eggplant and feta cheese in filo pastry - and the Portobello Mushrooms with Mozzarella. My kids love the vegetable soup and the stuffed potatoes. My husband likes the sushi. I wish the coffee were stronger, but that is my problem with every restaurant that isn't Starbucks. The Expresso Cafe is clean and even the plates are attractive. I am comfortable taking my non-Jewish friends here, and all the women love Sharon. Some people don't like the sports on the big TV, but for me, this is a draw.

If the Phils make the series, we are thinking about paying a visit to JJ Elephant, a new kosher sports cafe in Chester Spring - not exactly the epi-center of the Jewish community. I haven't heard of anyone who has been there. They have coffee, teas and hot chocolate, baked good and soup - not a well-rounded menu. But the TV is bigger than Sharon's, so we may take the hour drive for a series game. Stay tuned.

Not Philly's Finest, But Not So Bad

When we're home in Philadelphia, we rarely dine at the finest places the way we do on vacation. But, still, it's nice to know that we have that option, and we're glad that there are restaurants where we're not ashamed to take out-of-town guests or guests who are not Jewish or don't keep kosher. It wasn't always like this.

When we moved here in 2000, there were two kosher places in the Northeast - Holyland Pizza and Dragon Inn. And there was an Israeli place with a certification that no one accepted, so it finally went out of business. Still, it seemed like paradise to us after eight years in Milwaukee, which only offered a dairy restaurant housed in the Jewish nursing home. The food ranged from boring to awful, and the place wasn't open on Sundays or evenings - the times when most people want to go out and eat.

The Dragon Inn was a typical Chinese restaurant. It was a step above pizza and sufficed for anniversary and Mothers' Day dinner. But it went out of business a few years later because of a dispute among the owners.

The Holyland Pizza eventually spawned the Holyland Grill - a meat restaurant several blocks away. Both places are your typical kosher equivalent of McDonalds. The food is fast, edible but not great and there is no atmosphere. But your kids can run around the whole time, and no one cares. Well, sometimes the food is fast, I remember a Thursday night at the Pizza about nine years ago with my aunt when we waited about an hour to get served. Fortunately she loved watching little kids run around. But it's not the time of place you want to take your boss.

My boss did take me there once for my birthday with the rest of our department. I think she was ready to call the health department by the end of the meal. I've never seen anything offensive there - hair in the food or insects. But it has that kind of atmosphere.

The pizza at Holyland Pizza is very good. As is the calzone. A few times I've ordered the mozzarella sticks. They get them frozen, and they aren't always careful to cook them all the way through. They have recently added sushi to the menu, which my daughter and son-in-law report is the best in town.

Service is about what you'd expect. There is usually one staff person at the counter - a sullen teenager, often Israeli. They take your order as if they are doing you a big favor.

A couple of years ago, they remodeled. It was a definite improvement, but for some reason they carpeted the floor. Big mistake for a pizza shop with a million little kids running around.

Now that my kids are grown I never eat there. But we do takeout pizza because the pizza, as I've said, is really good. No one at my house eats sushi.

The Holyland Grill is an attempt to be a step higher in the restaurant food chain. Instead of ordering at the counter, they have wait service. The food is not fancy - schwarma, falafel, mixed grill, Philly steak sandwiches (without cheese) and fried chicken. The Israeli main dishes are not bad. The fried chicken is pretty tasteless. The vegetables are always overcooked, and the salad bar looks like it's been sitting around for too long. They also have a Chinese menu - after the Dragon Inn closed they hired the cook. I didn't care for the brown sauce everything was cooked in at the Dragon Inn, so I don't like it any better here. But the Sesame Chicken and Garlic Chicken are tasty.

Fortunately, we have many more choices now, which I'll start on next time. If you've eaten at any of these places and have your own opinions, please let me know.

Eating Kosher in The Big Easy Wasn't Hard

A few weeks ago, Air Tran sent me an email offering me a $64 fare (each way) to New Orleans. I had wanted to visit my brother all summer, but each time I checked, the fares in the $400 range. As soon as the email hit my inbox, I was on the phone with my brother, who was happy to have me, just worried about feeding me as he doesn't keep a kosher home.

He need not have worried. We dined very well in New Orleans, a city that prides itself on its cuisine - a very Jewish attitude. My first day, we went to lunch at the Kosher Cajun New York Deli. Kosher Cajun is a bookstore, deli, and kosher grocery under one roof. The atmosphere is grocery store with tables, but if you're hungry, you're hungry.

I ordered a Ruben Sandwich (hot corned beef on rye with Russian dressing and sauerkraut). My brother had just corned beef, and his friend Edmund had a Grilled Boneless Chicken Breast. The corned beef was sliced just right and arrived warm and fragrant. The sandwich wasn't as thick as you get in New York, but, hey, it must cost them a fortune to bring the corned beef down there. The chicken sandwich was moist and tender, and everyone was happy.

Kosher Cajun also had an extensive wine and kosher liquor section, including a $180 bottle of imported French brandy I'd never seen before. And be assured, New York is only the name of the place. This is New Orleans, and the decor is pure LSU purple and gold. You can pick up Saints and Hornets kippot by the register. My husband was thrilled because I picked up kosher beef jerky made by RJ's Kosher Jerky in California. He's been longing for it for years, and I had to go to New Orleans to find it.

The only disappointment was they only prepare authentic New Orleans dishes - gumbo, jumbalaya, red beans and rice - for special orders and for a minimum of 20 people for $120. My brother promised that the next time I visit, he'll have a party and order in.

In the evening we went to Casablanca, a higher end Moroccan restaurant. People on koshernola.com complain that Casablanca is expensive, but it was not any higher than nice places in other cities and way less than we paid in New York. Edmund began his meal with mushroom soup, which was a brown, clear broth filled with mushrooms. My brother has had a phobia about mushrooms since he was a small child, but he no longer cries and pitches a fit when they appear on the table. He was patient while Edmund enjoyed his soup and relieved when they took the bowl away. Philip and I both had Chicken Marrakech - a boneless breast marinated in herbs and grilled. Edmund had Fish Tangine. The meals came with a salad. Philip and I had mixed vegetables as a side dish, and Edmund had Moroccan rice, which was rice with middle eastern spices. The portions were large, and everything was fresh. We all enjoyed our meal. Our young Russian waitress was attentive and friendly. But everyone I met in New Orleans was friendly. Maybe all the grouchy people left during Katrina and didn't come back.

Both restaurants were clean and not the kind of places I had to cringe when I went in with people who didn't have to eat at a kosher restaurant. In fact, Philip said that after eating there a few months ago with my brother-in-law, he went back to Casablanca himself just because he liked the food.

Next time, it'll be home in Philadelphia.

Third Time was the Charm

Or Shalosh P'am Glida, as they say in Israel. I first attempted to go to Abigael's back in 1999 when I
drove my daughter from Milwaukee to Stern College. The restaurant had been highly recommended by our Shabbat hosts.

We were supposed to connect with my brother and my niece and go out together, but my brother never turned up. And I couldn't afford the dinner for three. So we ended up at Mendy's, a forgettable experience.

Two years ago I tried again with my son. He had invited me to come into New York to see The Apple Tree. But we had tickets for a matinee, and Abigael's wasn't open that early on a Sunday.

This trip, I had crossed Abigael's off my list because of uneven reviews on Shamash. But on our second day in New York, my husband and I toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then again walked back to our hotel on 33rd St. But that evening, we had tickets to Wicked, which limited our options. I had planned to go to Mike's Bistro, which had been highly recommended on Shamash.


But we couldn't get to Mike's, eat, get back to the hotel and change, and still make an 8 o'clock curtain. So as we passed Abigael's on our way down Broadway, we popped in for dinner. It was early for dinner in New York, so we had no problem getting a table. Contrary to the reports on Shamash, our waiter was polite and attentive. He asked if we had plans for the evening, and when we explained that we had tickets for a show, he said he would make sure that we were served promptly. Which we were. Yet we were not rushed either. The only flaw in the service was we were not offered a wine list, although there was a bar and must have been wine. It didn't matter in the end, since we had had enough sangria at Le Marsais to last two nights, and we wanted to be clear headed for the show.

I ordered the house salad. This was a large mixture of greens and veggies with a tasty salad dressing on the side. Our steak cravings had been satisfed the night before, so I ordered the duck and Stew selected the Vietnamese Chicken from the Asian Fusion Menu. The duck was crisp, not at all greasy. The glaze was not too sweet. I skipped the rice, but the bok choy was nicely done. Stew's chicken was tender, and the vegetables were crisp. He loves bok choy and goes bonkers whenever he can get it in a restaurant. We could have gone for dessert after all that walking, but we needed to change before the show. I had coffee, which was just okay. I don't understand why some of the best restaurants serve mediocre coffee when there are such good roasts available today. But that's another story.


In any case, all of our worries about poor service and underdone food were to no avail. The service was fine. If anything, we should have allowed more time for a leisurely dinner at this fine restaurant. Next time we may even have dessert.

A Steak to Build a Dream On

Since our New York vacation last month, my husband has been dreaming of steak.
In the almost 30 years we've been married, he's never dreamed of steak before. To calm him down, I had to promise that we'd return to Le Marais - the New York restaurant, not the Jewish district in Paris - for our anniversary in October. I picked New York as our vacation destination for one reason - kosher restaurants.
For me, a trip is not a vacation if I have to haul food along and worry about preparing meals. Last year, we spent Labor Day Weekend in Cooperstown. That worked out because it was an overnight trip. Cereal and deli will do me for two days; not for four.
Once we decided on New York my main task was selecting restaurants, no easy feat. Most of our friends never get out of Brooklyn when they visit the five boroughs, and Brooklyn is a place I try to avoid like the plague. Everyone thinks they have God next to them on the passenger seat giving them the right of way. Every time I have to go to Brooklyn for anything I promise myself, never again. So to find places to eat in New York, I checked Shamash.org, which has the most complete listing of kosher restaurants along with real people reviews. The first place on my list to check out was Abigael's on Broadway. Their chef has a TV show, and even people who only go to Brooklyn have heard of them. To my surprise, the most recent reviews weren't so hot. One of the reviewers said, "My wife prefers Le Marais." That was good enough for me.
After checking into our hotel, we spent the afternoon at the Jewish Museum, where we had a nice kosher lunch. We decided to walk back to the hotel, and since Le Marais was on the way, we stopped in.
We were starving after our long walk, and my husband pounced on the bread. We were thrilled by their very extensive wine list - none of the kosher restaurants in Philadelphia has a liquor license. We ordered a pitcher of Sangria, which very refreshing, but not too sweet.
Then we got down to business. My husband ordered the large rib eye, and I chose the Steak Au Poivre. We both ordered medium, and that's exactly what we got. Both steaks were juicy and full of flavor. I loved the peppery crust on mine. I even ate the fries - the first time since I began my Atkins diet six years ago. Neither of us eats dessert, but the steak was dessert enough. The service was fine, also. The waiter did his job promptly without being too friendly or pushy.
I was somewhat buzzed from half a pitcher of sangria, but it was a great meal. Le Marais is 150 W. 46th St. And we plan a return trip in October. It turned out to be a place of great significance in our life. When I told my son-in-law about our New York adventure, he said, "That's where I proposed to Simcha!"
Next up: Abigael's. Yes, we went there anyway.