him to open a kosher restau- rant. He decided to look into it. Despite the required clo- sures, he concluded, “you’ll get the support on the other days to make up for the loss of that Friday night. Because in Jew- ish tradition, Friday night is not what it is in Western tradition.” Five years ago, the right op- portunity came along. Scotia- bank Arena, where Chaim has had an outpost of EDO since the venue opened in 1999, had terminated the contract of its kosher food vendor and asked himtotakeoverthestation.Very quickly, the business proved that overhead was a bigger con- cern than operating hours. “The
real challenge is the cost of food,” Chaim says. “Meat is so expensive. How many [kosher] restaurants opened and closed within the last 30 years? If they’re meat restaurants they don’t last.” All aspiring kosher restaurateurs face a basic ques- tion: Meat or dairy? The answer doesn’t just affect their menus — it shapes their business models. Rachamim operates two locations of Eisenbergs: a dairy kitchen inside the Prosserman JCC and a meat location in the Schwartz/Reisman Centre. He cites two elements as being central to understanding the meat versus dairy equa- tion: the profit margins on ingredients and the range of ser- vices an establishment offers. On the first count, Rachamim says, “dairy and pareve [are] where your margins are better.” Simply put: because the baseline cost of the ingredients is lower, restaurateurs can mark them up more than they can meat items. Over the last 15 years, beef has become a luxury ingredient for everyone: the price climbed 75 percent from 2009 to 2024. Kosher beef is at least 50 percent more expensive than that. But while the cost of beef seemingly knows no upper limit, there’s a hard cap on what guests will pay for it. As any restaurateur will tell you, they can charge only so much for a hamburger or a steak. “On the meat, unfortunately, you can’t really mark up so much. Nobody’s going to pay you $30 for a sandwich.” Not unless you’re an institution and tourism destina- tion, like Katz’s Delicatessen, which can get away with charging $28.95 (US) for a pastrami sandwich because people want to eat at the restaurant from When Harry Met Sally. At $19.95 (Canadian, equal to less than half what Katz’s charges), Eisenbergs doesn’t expect such revenue — but sandwiches are still important to the restaurant’s operations. “You need those on the menu to draw attention,
Sukkot — that’s five holidays with multiple days they’re forced to close. And usually the day before those holidays, nobody’s going out din- ing because they’re at home preparing. That’s a lot of days to not have revenue.” Finally, there’s the size of the market itself. Of the 15 million Jews in the world, just over 400,000 live in Canada. COR estimates that a fifth of those keep kosher at home. National- ly, that’s a market of roughly 80,000 custom- ers—small enough to constrain the range of kosher products and businesses that would be sustainable, even absent other factors. If following kosher dietary law is challeng- ing, and the restaurant industry has notoriously thin profit margins, then making a dollar in the kosher restaurant game is practically a circus act — a financial and culinary tightrope walk where the rope is on fire and there is a bear behind you. Staying upright requires even more adaptability and attention to detail than regular restaurant ownership, since the bear has to be kosher and the rope has to be blessed by a rabbi. BARRY CHAIM HAS OWNED EDO, A JAPANESE restaurant in midtown Toronto, since 1986. It’s a neighbourhood with a large Jewish clientele, and members of the community regularly asked B LINTZES O R PASTRA M I?
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