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Friday April 6, 2007

Kosher food bland? Not for this Daly City caterer

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

It is delicacies like spotted dick, toad-in-the-hole and fried Mars bars that have given British cuisine its reputation as a cuisine only slightly more palatable than fasting.

And, as shocking as it may be to nostalgic j. readers, dishes such as kreplach, borscht and minced liver glistening with schmaltz have earned kosher gastronomic fare a near-Britannic standing in many consumers’ eyes.

But kosher food doesn’t have to be “flavorless, overcooked and dry,” says Daly City kosher caterer Tanya Nunes, the latest addition to a small but growing coterie of Bay Area kosher caterers.

Nunes’ path from growing up in an Azorian Portuguese Catholic family in Walnut Creek to catering strictly kosher events at Orthodox synagogues is as distinctive as her chicken with leek-Dijon mustard sauce.

Nunes, whose family ran a butcher shop for decades, got a “crash course in Judaism” — and kosher cooking— when she worked as a nanny for a large Orthodox family in Philadelphia.

It was a shock to “leave the lights and ovens on Fridays and Saturdays — and I had to remember to please place a bar across the thing on the refrigerator so the light wouldn’t come on.

“Growing up in Northern California with so many ethnic influences, I was taking the kosher thing to a level they hadn’t really seen,” Nunes said. “I’d do Mexican dairy. [The family] bought better dairy dishes because I made so many nice dairy meals.”

Nunes eventually left the family for culinary school, then landed her first job at the prestigious Le Bec-Fin restaurant in Philadelphia under a master chef with a temper hotter than a jalapeno. Working under the exacting (but calm) supervision of the Vaad Hakashrus of Northern California is now a relative vacation.

Even though Nunes is not Jewish, she’s now an old hand at kosher. She was shocked during a recent shopping expedition at a supermarket chain (that will remain nameless) that the kosher for Passover section was next to the store bakery.

She met her supervisor, Rabbi Ben-Tzion Welton, when she catered his son’s bar mitzvah. She doesn’t hold it against him that he nixed her tray of 200 parve brownies.

“It was OU parve, but this one particular factory also produced dairy mixes,” she recalled.

“I said, ‘What will people eat for dessert?’ He said ‘Don’t worry. That’s the way it goes sometimes.’”

For more information see Nunes’ Web site, www.cheftanya.com.

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