{"id":359886,"date":"2025-08-20T16:47:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T16:47:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/359886\/"},"modified":"2025-08-20T16:47:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T16:47:11","slug":"ashkenazi-food-goes-upscale-as-a-new-generation-of-jewish-chefs-modernize-their-bubbes-recipes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/359886\/","title":{"rendered":"Ashkenazi food goes upscale as a new generation of Jewish chefs modernize their bubbes\u2019 recipes"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Chef and owner of Linny\u2019s, David Schwartz, prepares challah.Daniel Neuhaus\/Supplied<\/p>\n

At Linny\u2019s, an elegant steakhouse on Toronto\u2019s trendy Ossington strip, a group <\/b>of servers in white aprons and bow ties brings out an array of food <\/b>with deep roots in Jewish Ashkenazi culture. These are the same Central and Eastern European dishes that appear on the menus of classic Jewish delis and that bubbes (Yiddish for grandmothers) serve at family meals, but they\u2019ve undergone a transformation. <\/p>\n

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Linny\u2019s challah is served with housemade farmer\u2019s cheese and jam made from seasonal fruit.Daniel Neuhaus\/Supplied<\/p>\n

The challah ($15) \u2013 the bread traditionally served at the weekly Shabbat meal \u2013 is an individual round braided loaf, served with house-made farmer\u2019s cheese and wonderfully tart jam made from local strawberries. The mouth-watering pastrami ($49), brined for up to six days, smoked and brushed with tallow butter, isn\u2019t served in a classic deli sandwich, but directly on the plate, like Linny\u2019s $200 porterhouse steak. <\/p>\n

The kasha and bows ($25), an Ashkenazi dish consisting of buckwheat and schmaltz (rendered chicken or goose fat), is elevated with handmade egg noodles and a sauce with seasonal vegetables. The schnitzel ($32), normally a soothing comfort food, moves into edgier territory by using beef tripe <\/b>with chicken gravy. <\/p>\n

David Schwartz, who is behind Linny\u2019s, is one of a small group Jewish chefs in Toronto and New York moving into upscale Ashkenazi dining, using refined techniques to inject new life into classics. While traditional Jewish spots such as Montreal\u2019s famed Schwartz\u2019s Deli and Toronto\u2019s United Bakers Dairy Restaurant have been casual, affordable places, these new restaurants typically require reservations and are better suited to cocktails with friends or date nights than family-style dining. <\/p>\n

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Linny’s injects new life into its schnitzel by using beef tripe with chicken gravy.Daniel Neuhaus\/Supplied<\/p>\n

Schwartz, who also created Sunnys Chinese and Mimi Chinese, had long wanted to open a Jewish deli, but after seeing many of those institutions fail<\/a>, he figured that having a higher price point would <\/b>make it more feasible to use the laborious handcrafted processes that are hard to recoup in the price of a sandwich. While some of his diners <\/b>are new to Ashkenazi food, others grew up with it. <\/p>\n

\u201cSome people can\u2019t let go of the context of how they originally interacted with some of these dishes, and then for others, like myself and my generation, it makes it exciting again,\u201d says Schwartz, who opened Linny\u2019s, named in honour of his late mother, last September. \u201cA lot of the stuff on the menu were things I did not enjoy eating growing up. Kasha and bows \u2013 I hated it. So I thought, how do we make a version of kasha and bows that\u2019s true to its origin point, but it\u2019s exciting and delicious for people like myself?\u201d<\/p>\n

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Linny\u2019s on Toronto\u2019s trendy Ossington strip serves an array of food with deep roots in Jewish Ashkenazi culture.Daniel Neuhaus\/Supplied<\/p>\n

In recent decades, there has been more excitement<\/a> about Jewish Mediterranean food \u2013 Sephardic and Israeli \u2013 than Ashkenazi dishes, which were seen as bland, overcooked and heavy in starch and fat. However, the 2016 cookbook The Gefilte Manifesto<\/a>, by Liz Alpern and Jeffrey Yoskowitz of Brooklyn, N.Y., prompted a broader rethinking of Ashkenazi food by <\/b>leaning into seasonal, vegetable-forward dishes that had been overshadowed after Jews migrated to North America. <\/p>\n

Other North American restaurants updating Ashkenazi dishes include the upscale Brooklyn spots Gertrude\u2019s and Agi\u2019s Counter and the mid-range Montreal eateries Arthurs Nosh Bar and Hof Kelsten. <\/p>\n

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Shauna Godfrey opened her restaurant Maven on Harbord, a traditionally Jewish street in Toronto in November.Shlomi Amiga\/Supplied<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s part of this trend of young Jews drawing on their heritage, using great ingredients and making their food in very intentional and thoughtful ways,\u201d says Kat Romanow, a Montreal Jewish food historian and recipe developer. <\/b>\u201cIt\u2019s amazing to see Jewish food moving forward and another generation putting their own spin on it. It\u2019s not just brisket and potatoes and schmaltz.\u201d <\/p>\n

Shauna Godfrey opened her Toronto <\/b>restaurant Maven on Harbord, a traditionally Jewish street, <\/a>in November. Maven (Yiddish for \u201cexpert\u201d) was the nickname of her bubbe Rose,<\/a> who taught her cooking techniques. <\/p>\n

\u201cI felt like there was pretty good representation in the city of deli, bagel places, Middle Eastern food. My grandmother was from Poland and I felt like this kind of food wasn\u2019t really represented in restaurants,\u201d says Godfrey, who previously cooked Asian cuisine <\/b>at Momofuku. \u201cI try to keep our food rooted in something that feels like a traditional dish or something in the world of Ashkenazi cooking, but use techniques and ingredients and flavours that are slightly different.\u201d <\/p>\n

Closer to the classics than Linny\u2019s, Maven serves its crowd-pleasing chicken schnitzel with lacto-fermented plum sauce, which includes shallots, white soy sauce and brown butter. The duck confit cholent, made with romano beans, schmaltzy onion and dill, takes three days to prepare and draws from French cassoulet as well as the traditional Shabbat stew.<\/p>\n

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Maven’s duck confit cholent takes three days to prepare and draws from French cassoulet as well as the traditional Shabbat stew.Daniel Neuhaus\/Supplied<\/p>\n

Other Jewish chefs, such as Zach Kolomeir, are drawing on their heritage in unexpected ways. His newly opened Toronto Italian eatery, N.L. Ginzburg, serves a traditional chopped liver dish seasoned like an Italian antipasti. The restaurant\u2019s non-kosher mixed grill, a heaping plate of pork, certainly doesn\u2019t conform with Jewish religious law, but Kolomeir says it draws inspiration from older Jewish communities that maximized limited resources.<\/p>\n

While the chefs are keen to avoid talking about politics and the Middle East \u2013 understandable given the targeting of Jewish restaurants around the world in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack and subsequent Israel-Hamas war \u2013 they are proud to draw on their heritage and find new audiences for Ashkenazi food. Connecting with their own family stories, and <\/b>harkening back to an earlier era, prior to the founding of Israel, can be safer ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a way of staying Jewish, but not treading into some awkward questions,\u201d says Nora Rubel, a professor in Jewish studies at the University of Rochester. \u201cIt\u2019s an easier sell to say, \u2018This is the Jewish food that our grandmothers made.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

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Maven, yiddish for ‘expert,’ was the nickname of Ms. Godfrey’s bubbe Rose, who taught her cooking techniques.Daniel Neu\/Supplied<\/p>\n

Maven, in particular, has become a gathering point for various groups from Toronto\u2019s diverse Jewish community, which have reacted positively to Godfrey\u2019s reinventions. And those who prefer the more casual Jewish haunts haven\u2019t been completely ignored by this new wave of chefs. If the white-tablecloth atmosphere of Linny\u2019s isn\u2019t your thing, you can still enjoy Schwartz\u2019s meticulous cooking techniques at a more affordable price by grabbing the satisfying $16 pastrami sandwich at Linny\u2019s Luncheonette, his new takeout spinoff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Chef and owner of Linny\u2019s, David Schwartz, prepares challah.Daniel Neuhaus\/Supplied At Linny\u2019s, an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4318],"tags":[6934,6925,6935,1500,6918,6936,943,6917,6930,6931,6927,6919,6916,1700,2266,728,6929,6923,6946,6920,6921,1234,105,6926,388,3611,6607,603,6941,6942,6944,6939,6943,4434,6937,6940,6922,6932,6933,285,3027,6938,6924,53,183,6928,16,15,727,263,6945],"class_list":{"0":"post-359886","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-alberta","9":"tag-arts-news","10":"tag-bc","11":"tag-breaking-news","12":"tag-breaking-news-video","13":"tag-british-columbia","14":"tag-canada","15":"tag-canada-news","16":"tag-canada-sports","17":"tag-canada-sports-news","18":"tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","19":"tag-canadian-breaking-news","20":"tag-canadian-news","21":"tag-economy","22":"tag-education","23":"tag-environment","24":"tag-federal-government","25":"tag-foreign-news","26":"tag-globe-and-mail","27":"tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","28":"tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","29":"tag-government","30":"tag-health","31":"tag-life-news","32":"tag-lifestyle","33":"tag-local-news","34":"tag-manitoba","35":"tag-national-news","36":"tag-new-brunswick","37":"tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","38":"tag-northwest-territories","39":"tag-nova-scotia","40":"tag-nunavut","41":"tag-nutrition","42":"tag-ontario","43":"tag-pei","44":"tag-photos","45":"tag-political-news","46":"tag-political-opinion","47":"tag-politics","48":"tag-politics-news","49":"tag-quebec","50":"tag-sports-news","51":"tag-technology","52":"tag-travel","53":"tag-trudeau","54":"tag-uk","55":"tag-united-kingdom","56":"tag-us-news","57":"tag-world-news","58":"tag-yukon"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}