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Thursday August 23, 2007

Sunnyvale deli drops kosher status

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

Kosher consumers in the South Bay uttering the old ad line “Where’s the beef?” will have a new answer at the end of the month: Nowhere.

Restaurateur Israel Rind announced that as of Sept. 1 his three-month-old Sunnyvale eatery Izzy’s Brooklyn Deli will forego its kosher certification and be known as “Izzy’s Brooklyn Café.”

“It’s a shame. The community will lose,” said Rind, whose Palo Alto restaurant, Izzy’s Brooklyn Bagels, will still be supervised by the Vaad HaKashrus.

“I wanted to keep [the Sunnyvale restaurant] supervised, but to keep it closed on Shabbat was impossible from a business perspective.”

For the Bay Area’s kosher community, it was the second consecutive month that a restaurant slipped through its fingers; Berkeley’s Ristorante Raphael closed on the first of this month.

That restaurant stayed open on Shabbat through a procedure in which it was technically sold to its non-Jewish chef every Friday. Rind said he asked the Vaad for a similar deal but was rebuffed: “They said they got stricter.”

Rabbi Ben-Tzion Welton, the Vaad’s Northern California coordinator, verified Rind’s story.

“It a policy decision, and we’ve been advised [Raphael-like arrangements are] something we don’t really want to do,” said the rabbi of the owner-transfer.

Minus that option, Rind says he couldn’t afford to keep his Sunnyvale restaurant open and supervised with only five business days a week.

“You end up paying as much for supervision as you do for rent,” he said.

“It’s double rent, and you’re closed for 75 days a year.”

In January, Rind sold the San Francisco outlet of his kosher bagel bakery, which was located around the corner from AT&T Park; he says it was too much work for him and his wife to run both bagel shops.

While his Sunnyvale café will still offer prepackaged kosher foods such as knishes, he doesn’t expect any strictly kosher consumers to set foot in the place anymore.

Welton concurred, but noted some may go, anyway — “It’s a free country,” he said with a laugh.

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