Every restaurant in the world is struggling with the industry’s three main types of over- head: labour costs; fixed costs (rent, utilities, insurance, etc.); and what’s called the cost of goods sold (COGS)—the price of the raw ma- terials, including not just ingredients but wine, packaging, and other consumable or disposable products. Historically, these have each been pegged at eating up 30 percent of a restaurant’s revenue, leaving just 10 percent for profit. That model, if it was ever the norm, is now long gone: the average full-service restaurant sees profits of between three to five percent. Food infla- tion, though easing off its 2023 height, has sent COGS into the stratosphere. (The cost of filling a deep-fryer with oil, hardly an ingredient seen by diners as a luxury that justifies high prices, has jumped 55 percent in five years.) A mass ex- odus of employees, and the resulting competi- tion for staff, has been not just a cost increase but a drain on time and resources for owners and managers, who are constantly seeking, interviewing, and training new people. And fixed costs in Toronto and Montreal, where the majority of Canada’s Jewish population lives, are always climbing; every lease renewal threat- ens the bottom line. Running a kosher restaurant means facing all these same challenges, and then adding in several more variables. First, there’s the mat- ter of the COGS. Not all kosher foods are more expensive, but key ingredients like beef or cheese can be double or triple the price of their non-kosher equivalents. Obtaining kosher cer- tification for the restaurant itself adds anoth- er layer of fees, as does the employment of a mashgiach who ensures a kitchen adheres to the standards of kashrut on an ongoing basis. Then there are the hours of operation: many kosher restaurants, which need to be closed by sundown on Fridays, don’t open at all that day; some also don’t open for dinner after sundown on Saturday. (For most establishments, open- ing the business for a half-day is more trouble than it is worth.) These are the busiest days for restaurants: even those that do open for Friday lunch or Saturday dinner are forgoing some of the most lucrative meal services of the week. “They’re closed for 24 hours or longer ev- ery week, 52 days a year,” says kosher restau- rant maven Dani Klein, a marketer who has operated the website YeahThatsKosher for the last 17 years. “And it doesn’t include Pass- over, Shavuot, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah,
feta cheese. It was soft and crumbly, perfect for the pop- ular Greek salad at Eisenbergs Sandwich Co., his kosher dairy restaurant. When the locally produced cheese lost its hechsher, its kosher certification, Rachamim switched to another brand. Then they lost their hechsher as well. Now, Rachamim tells me, “we’re stuck using other feta that we think is not as good, and is also double or triple the price.” It’s not like he can go to a supplier to choose another from a dozen feta-style cheeses — find a similar Greek or per- haps experiment with a grassy, creamy Bulgarian. It must be one of the options recognized by the Kashruth Coun- cil of Canada (COR), Eisenbergs’ kosher certifier. Unable to find a satisfactory replacement via commercial distribu- tors, Rachamim is stuck buying an expensive import from the supermarket, rendering the dish, one of his best sellers, unprofitable. As a result, Rachamim is exploring a menu change, a switch to another salad that may have better margins. For the swap to succeed, the new salad will also have to be fla- vourful, healthy, and colourful — he’s thinking maybe a fattoush with pomegranate seeds and goat cheese, which he can get at a better price. B O AZ RA C HAMIM L O VED HIS FIRST
34 SUMMER 2025
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