In Kosher Kitchens, More Than Taste Matters

Rabbi Joseph Pinto performs the ritual ceremony where all metal, ceramic and glass used in the kitchen are dipped in a mikveh which holds rain water at Chabad Lubavitch just down the street from the new kosher restaurant that will be opening soon - Pomegranate Bistro. (Katherine Frey - The Washington Post)

"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 former Chicken Out in the Cabin John Shopping Center, which was being converted into the Pomegranate Bistro. Much of the equipment was new, but anything that had ever been used or even tested with real food had to be kosherized.

"If we find so much as a crumb, we kosherize it," Sanders said that day, wearing yellow rubber gloves with his shirt and tie as he bustled around the kitchen. "Toasters are the hardest."

Most kosher cleaning has to do with applying extreme heat. To kosherize the industrial dishwasher, the water temperature was upped for a few cycles, from 190 degrees to 212 degrees. They lined the warming ovens with Sterno burners to boost their 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 colors of their plastic handles: red for meat, blue for fish and green for parve, or neutral for 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's 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. On the first day of serious cooking, a dress rehearsal a few days before opening, Pinto had not dipped the pepper grinder, forcing a sous chef to dutifully smash pepper corns with a kosherized ladle.

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. We'll feed the staff here."

Verschleisser is Jewish, as is assistant manager Martin Chavez, but most of the staff is not. Tassiello is Catholic. 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."