For attendees at this week’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference, the Trump hotel opened a pop-up kosher-certified restaurant — but at a price.
The hotel converted one of its banquet rooms into a full-on restaurant catered by Medina Cuisine, which is only available for the three days that hotel guests are also attending AIPAC, an annual conference devoted to promoting the United States’s diplomatic relationship with Israel. The restaurant is serving a variety of soups, entrees, and desserts at a flat rate of $150 per plate.
The Bethesda, Maryland-based caterer, Michael Medina, told the Washington Examiner that the idea for the restaurant arose last year after an increased demand at the hotel for kosher catering during AIPAC. Since Medina already serves the Trump hotel, as well as many other hotels in the D.C. area, hotel management asked him to set up a temporary restaurant for AIPAC.
“It made sense to everybody,” Medina said. “It’s obviously a market we want to go after. They’re going to be in town anyway, and the hotel, probably like any hotel, wants to advertise their space for future visits, so this made sense for both of us.”
Rather than ask Medina to bring in a portable kitchen, as the company normally does, the hotel koshered one of its kitchens with the help of the Rabbinical Council of Greater Washington. The council is responsible for certifying all restaurants in the D.C. area.
People who don’t want to shell out can always eat the food at AIPAC, which has been kosher since the late 1980s when AIPAC President Howard Friedman decided the annual conference should more fully serve the needs of its growing number of Orthodox attendees. This year, the conference hired more than 300 chefs and 1,000 wait staff to serve massive amounts of food: 10,000 hard-boiled eggs, 25,000 hot dogs, and 37,500 bagels, according to AIPAC organizers. The kitchens at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, where AIPAC has been held for the past few years, have been koshered to serve upward of 18,000 people. It is one of the largest kosher events in the United States.
But, for anyone looking for affordable kosher dining outside of the convention center, the options are limited in a city notorious for its dearth of kosher joints. The council has certified only four restaurants within the city, and one of them, a hot dog stand in Nationals Park, is only open seasonally.
Glatt kosher means a place that doesn’t go in for leniencies or exceptions, specifically with regard to meat. There are other more generally kosher or “kosher-inspired” restaurants in the area, but they are all either vegan or not certified. The one glatt kosher restaurant in D.C. is Char Bar, located in Foggy Bottom. And, leaving aside the Trump hotel pop-up, it is the only kosher restaurant in the city that offers fine dining. Medina used to run another one, Distrikt Bistro, in Dupont Circle, but he closed it several years ago to focus on his catering business.
Because of its singularity, the regulars at Char Bar are a tight-knit customer base. Levi Shemtov, a rabbi and executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch, eats at the restaurant often enough that the management has paid homage to him in a menu item. The Shemtov salad, which Shemtov says he favors for its simplicity and healthful substance, is one of the restaurant’s best-selling salads.
“I ordered it so many times that they just named it after me,” Shemtov told the Washington Examiner.
Char Bar’s three busiest days of the year are during AIPAC, owner Michael Chelst told the Washington Examiner.
“People are surprised that there are not more kosher restaurants in D.C.,” Chelst said. “But there have been a lot of restaurants who have tried, and they have failed.”
Chelst said that the lack of restaurants is probably accounted for by the fact that most of D.C.’s observant Jewish population lives in the Maryland suburbs, which, with traffic, is closer to dining options in Silver Spring or Baltimore. Char Bar succeeds, he said, because it caters to a mostly itinerant clientele, such as the crowd at AIPAC and other D.C. conferences.
Still, Chelst said, keeping kosher presents a built-in difficulty for the restaurant business.
“Being closed on the two busiest nights of the week, Friday and Saturday, makes it challenging,” he said.
The city has historically been lacking in kosher options. During the George H.W. Bush administration, the only kosher restaurant in the city was the cafe at the George Washington University Hillel. The fare improved in the early 2000s when the lobbyist Jack Abramoff attempted to bring a kosher food scene to D.C. with a sit-down restaurant called Signatures and a deli called Stacks. Both places failed upon his 2006 incarceration for bribery, mail fraud, conspiracy, and tax evasion.
After he was released from prison in 2010, Abramoff told Tablet that he didn’t have the funds to try again.
“I lost millions on Stacks,” he said. “I did it willingly, but that’s in the past. It’ll have to be someone else.”
On Capitol Hill, none of the cafeterias had kosher options until 2012, when an aide for Utah Sen. Mike Lee lobbied the coffee shop in the Dirksen building to serve catered kosher sandwiches. The move received much praise on the Hill, with then-Sen. Joe Lieberman remarking that the food had a “certain aura of holiness,” according to the Washington Jewish Week.
