When I started writing this restaurant column in June 2022, I certainly wasn’t thinking about what the 100th column would look like. More than four years and 100 restaurants later, I thought it would be interesting to take all those columns and see what they actually say about the kosher restaurant scene.
Some of the numbers were pretty much what I expected. Others surprised me.
The first thing that stands out is just how meat heavy the column has been. Of the 100 restaurants, 69 were meat compared with 31 that were dairy or pareve. That isn’t entirely surprising. Meat restaurants tend to generate a lot of excitement, particularly when a new concept comes along and there are simply more ways to make a big production out of a meat meal. Still, nearly a 70-30 split is pretty striking.
The geographic breakdown is more interesting. Manhattan leads with 19 restaurants, followed closely by Brooklyn with 18. South Jersey came in third with 15, followed by Long Island with 14 and North Jersey with 12. Monsey and Queens each had seven while four restaurants were out of town — Columbus, Chicago, Baltimore and Los Angeles. Connecticut/Westchester accounted for three and Staten Island had one.
The South Jersey number makes plenty of sense when you consider the concentration of religious Jews there. Between Lakewood and Deal, the region has an enormous kosher-consuming population and the restaurant scene reflects that. In fact, Manhattan and Brooklyn combined accounted for 37 of the 100 restaurants, while South Jersey alone had 15.
But perhaps the biggest surprise is the breakdown by restaurant style. I classified 17 of the restaurants as counter service, 38 as waiter service but not fine dining and 45 as fine dining.
That means that almost half of the restaurants I’ve written about were fine dining.
Obviously, there is some personal bias involved here. I’m a restaurant writer, so I’m probably more likely to seek out a restaurant doing something interesting than one that simply serves a good sandwich. But the number is still significant. There are now enough genuinely high-end kosher restaurants that I was able to devote 45 of my first 100 columns to them.
And those 45 fine-dining restaurants break down in an interesting way: 11 dairy restaurants, 20 “Fancy Fleish” restaurants and 14 steakhouses.
The steakhouse number is particularly telling. Of those 14 steakhouses, not a single one has closed.
That doesn’t necessarily mean every steakhouse is guaranteed to succeed, but in my sample of 100 restaurants, the classic kosher steakhouse has been remarkably durable. The same cannot be said for the newer generation of higher-end meat restaurants. The 20 Fancy Fleish restaurants — contemporary, ambitious meat restaurants that aren’t traditional steakhouses — have had more trouble staying power.
That brings us to the overall survival rate. Seventy-five of the 100 restaurants I’ve written about are still open while 25 have already closed. Twenty-five percent is a substantial number but the list of closures is more revealing than the number itself.
Smokehouses have had a particularly rough run. All three smokehouses I covered — Smokey Hill, Wandering Que and Chief Smokehouse — have closed. That’s a small sample, so I wouldn’t pretend it proves anything about the entire category, but it certainly caught my attention when I looked at the numbers.
Middle Eastern and Mediterranean restaurants haven’t fared particularly well either. Seven of the 16 restaurants I put into that category are already closed, meaning almost 44% of them are gone.
Monsey, meanwhile, looks remarkably healthy by comparison. Only one of the seven Monsey restaurants I covered has closed. That was Dolcetto and even that closure came with an interesting footnote: another restaurant moved into the space within just a few months. Based on these 100 columns, Monsey’s restaurant scene certainly appears to be moving in a positive direction.
The fine dining numbers are interesting for another reason. Fine dining has been the strongest part of the restaurant scene represented in these columns, but even within fine dining there are clear differences. The high-end dairy restaurants have had very few closures, the steakhouses have had none and the Fancy Fleish category has been considerably less bulletproof.
Then there’s the category that was probably the hardest to create: cuisine.
Anyone who has looked at enough kosher restaurant menus knows that they don’t always cooperate with traditional culinary classifications. A restaurant might have sushi, tacos, pasta, steak and a dish involving pastrami all on the same menu and somehow that can make perfect sense to its target audience.
So I created a category called JCF — Jewish Comfort Fusion.
The basic idea is that this is the kind of restaurant where a non-Jew might look at the menu and wonder what exactly is going on, while a frum Jew would immediately understand it. The foods may not traditionally belong together but they somehow make perfect sense in a kosher restaurant.
JCF turned out to be the largest category by far, with 26 of the 100 restaurants. Contemporary came next with 17, followed by Mediterranean with 16, Italian with 11 and Asian with nine. American accounted for seven, Chef Driven for six, Mexican for five and French for three.
In other words, more than half of these restaurants fell into just three categories: JCF, Contemporary and Mediterranean.
The fact that JCF is the largest category may actually be one of the most distinctly kosher findings in the entire exercise. Kosher restaurants have developed their own culinary language. They borrow from different cuisines, mix traditional Jewish foods with modern restaurant trends and create combinations that might look strange on paper but work perfectly for the people eating them.
And finally, there’s another number that says a lot about what this column has actually been documenting. Seventy-five of the 100 restaurants were new when I wrote about them. Only 25 were established restaurants. That means this column hasn’t really been a survey of the existing kosher restaurant world. It has been a record of the new one.
Since June 2022, I’ve watched restaurants open, close, reinvent themselves and try things that would have seemed unusual in the kosher world not that long ago. Some concepts have worked. Some haven’t. Some cuisines have flourished while others have struggled. Steakhouses have proven remarkably resilient, while smokehouses have had a rougher time. Monsey has been busy. And a category that I had to invent because nothing else quite fit ended up being the largest cuisine classification of all.
There’s also a funny symmetry to the numbers: 75% of the restaurants were new when I wrote about them and 75% are still open today. Those are obviously two completely different statistics and they don’t represent the same 75 restaurants, but together they paint a pretty good picture of the last four years. I’ve spent most of this column covering the new restaurants entering the market and three-quarters of those restaurants have managed to stick around.
After 100 columns, that may be my biggest takeaway.
The kosher restaurant world is changing quickly, it’s getting more ambitious and it’s becoming harder to categorize.
And honestly, that makes my job a lot more interesting.
Nati Burnside is a freelance writer living in Fair Lawn and is a man of many interests. He can be reached at [email protected].
Dining and Cooking