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

“It’s growing all the time,” Sanders said. “Now there is a guy who wants to open a Chinese place.”

The certification process for each new restaurant begins weeks before the first customer is served. Sanders and his team of rabbis descended last month on the building, a former Chicken Out, being converted into the Pomegranate Bistro. Much of the equipment was new, but anything that ever had been used or even tested with real food had to be kosherized.

“If we find so much as a crumb, we kosherize it,” said Sanders on that day, wearing yellow rubber gloves with his shirt and tie. “Toasters are the hardest.”

Most kosher cleaning has to do with applying extreme heat. To kosherize the industrial dishwasher, they upped the water temperature for a few cycles, from 190 degrees to 212 degrees. They lined the warming ovens with Sterno burners to boost its maximum temperature for two hours. As Sanders heated the iron cooking grates to a red-hot glow, his assistant poured pitcher after pitcher of boiling water over twin steel prep tables.

There are two of almost everything in the bistro kitchen: twin stacks of ovens, twin deep fryers, a brace of Southbend six-burner ranges. One for fish, the other meat. Not all Jewish cooks are familiar with the Talmudic separation of fish and meat, but it is an Orthodox tenet enforced by the local rabbinical council.

“There is no surf and turf in a kosher restaurant,” Sanders said. Cooking utensils are coded by the color of their plastic handles, red for meat, blue for fish and green for parve, or neutral, foods such as vegetables and pasta. In the old days, kosher cooks had to mark their equipment with dabs of paint or metal stamps. Most health regulations now require separate color-coded utensils for meat, raw meat and produce, bringing all commercial kitchens closer to the kosher system.

“They’re catching up,” said Rabbi Gedalia Walls, one of Sanders’ kosherizing crew, of the cooking practices in the non-orthodox world. “Now all they have to do is learn not to put meat and cheese together.”

Before any of the knives, spoons or whisks can be used, Pinto takes the whole lot to a nearby synagogue and dips them one by one in a mikva, a ritual basin filled with collected rainwater.

Nothing at first glance would suggest that the Pomegranate Bistro is a scrupulously religious eatery. The dark wood decor is generically upscale, and the wasabi tuna, chicken Florentine and beef satay could be found on many a modern American menu. But diners won’t find shellfish among the offerings, or rabbit or pork any other food forbidden by kashrut, the Hebrew term for keeping kosher. There is not a milk product on the menu, or even in the building.

“It’s easier just to keep dairy out of the restaurant altogether,” said general manager Eli Verschleisser, a former kosher inspector.

“We won’t allow any outside food in at all.”

Verschleisser is Jewish, as is assistant manager Martin Chavez, but Tassiello is Catholic and most of the kitchen workers are Latino.

“I’m not Jewish, but this tradition is very old and I appreciate that,” worker Delfino Lopez said. “We are very careful to do it right.”

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