In Kosher kitchens everywhere, Jewish food law matters more than just taste

In the middle of a recent lunch-hour frenzy at the new Pomegranate Bistro, Tassiello — wearing a crucifix — cast a pleading look at Rabbi Joseph Pinto — wearing a yarmulke — and held up a bundle of herbs.

“Can you do these right away?” Tassiello asked.

Pinto grabbed the greens and hurried to a tub filled with water, salt and vinegar. Because the Torah forbids observant Jews to consume insects, even accidentally, fresh produce in a kosher kitchen isn’t so much washed as prepped for surgery.

Pinto vigorously sluiced the herbs, rinsed them and dunked them in the tub.

“The salt and vinegar makes the bugs come free,” Pinto murmured as he scrutinized each stem under bright fluorescent lights. “Ah, ha,” he cried, pointing to a nearly microscopic mite swimming for its life.

Pinto is a kosher supervisor, or mashgiach, for the Rabbinical Council of Greater Washington. Recruited, trained and assigned by the council, he is posted full time at the Pomegranate Bistro in suburban Potomac, Md., which opened this week as the region’s newest fully certified kosher restaurant.

Pinto and about 30 other in-house inspectors serve as a little-seen kosher police force in restaurants certified by the rabbinical council. They ensure that dairy never touches meat, that a knife used to bone fish is never used to cut steak, that no creepy-crawlies ever make it into a salad.

They turn on the ovens in the morning and burners as needed (to fulfill the edict that a Jew be involved in the cooking), and they search every label for the telltale circled “K” or other marks of rabbinical correctness.

And when they spot a slip-up, they can trash the food, shut down the line and order any offending pot or pan, unto an entire oven, to be cleaned and re-sanctified before it goes back in service.

“It happens once in a while,” said Pinto, a French immigrant who has been a kosher supervisor in restaurants for the past five years.

“In a busy kitchen, people can a make a mistake. Most of the time, they are very nice when we have to stop something.”

The supervisors, who often stay for years at a given location, maintain remarkable vigilance over their restaurants, typically being the first to arrive and not leaving until after the last dish is washed. (Indeed, Pinto literally holds the keys to the bistro kitchen; neither the owners nor managers have a set). Sometimes, the supervisors will take on other, non-kosher duties, such as managing inventory or clearing the cash register each night.

“These restaurants contract with us to guarantee that they maintain kosher status, and they quickly learn that the supervisor is worthy of the highest trust,” said Rabbi Binyamin Sanders, who runs the program for the rabbinical council. “It’s a relationship that works for everybody.”

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