Boaz Rachamim loved his first feta cheese. It was soft and crumbly, perfect for the popular 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 perhaps experiment with a grassy, creamy Bulgarian. It must be one of the options recognized by the Kashruth Council of Canada (COR), Eisenbergs’ kosher certifier. Unable to find a satisfactory replacement via commercial distributors, 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 flavourful, healthy, and colourful — he’s thinking maybe a fattoush with pomegranate seeds and goat cheese, which he can get at a better price.
Every restaurant in the world is struggling with the industry’s three main types of overhead: labour costs; fixed costs (rent, utilities, insurance, etc.); and what’s called the cost of goods sold (COGS) — the price of the raw materials, 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 inflation, 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 exodus of employees, and the resulting competition 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 threatens the bottom line.
Running a kosher restaurant means facing all these same challenges, and then adding in several more variables. First, there’s the matter 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 certification for the restaurant itself adds another 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, opening 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 every week, 52 days a year,” says kosher restaurant maven Dani Klein, a marketer who has operated the website YeahThatsKosher for the last 17 years. “And it doesn’t include Passover, Shavuot, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot — that’s five holidays with multiple days they’re forced to close. And usually the day before those holidays, nobody’s going out dining 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. Nationally, that’s a market of roughly 80,000 customers — 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 challenging, 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.
Blintzes or Pastrami?
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 him to open a kosher restaurant. He decided to look into it. Despite the required closures, he concluded, “you’ll get the support on the other days to make up for the loss of that Friday night. Because in Jewish tradition, Friday night is not what it is in Western tradition.”
Five years ago, the right opportunity came along. Scotiabank 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 him to take over the station. Very quickly, the business proved that overhead was a bigger concern 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 year? If they’re meat restaurants they don’t last.”
All aspiring kosher restaurateurs face a basic question: 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 equation: the profit margins on ingredients and the range of services 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 destination, 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, as your loss leaders,” Rachamim says. “Like Costco — they have hot dogs for $1.50, and [those] drive people in to buy other items.”
Profit margins aren’t the only consideration. Another factor that plays a distinctive role in the kosher food ecosystem is catering, which is far more common that in the mainstream restaurant industry. Catering is more profitable than restaurant service, and it can provide steadier income through contracts (such as standing arrangements to cater meals for a JCC, school, or synagogue).
This is helpful because margins tend to be higher on catering than restaurants. A caterer doesn’t just sell the food, which has thin margins: they sell services, like wait staff, and access to supplies — every glass, plate, and utensil is rented to the client at a much more advantageous markup than a steak. Restaurants, of course, provide services (waiting on patrons at their tables or packaging up their takeout orders) and require supplies, but, because guests aren’t charged for these separately, these costs get folded into the prices of menu items; there’s only so much mark-up that restaurateurs can add to those. In catering, each of these other items is invoiced separately, on top of the food: businesses charge for the hourly wage of each employee and the rental of every piece of tableware, each of which can then be marked-up.
Stamp of Approval
Opening and maintaining a kosher commercial kitchen goes far beyond the ingredients and recipes you use. Kashrut isn’t an honour system: it requires operating under the oversight of a certification organization — in Canada, that generally means COR (The Kashrut Council of Canada), MK (MK Kosher Global Certification Agency, née Montreal Kosher), or KSR (Kashrut Supervision du Rabbinat).
Kitchens must be regularly scrutinized by a mashgiach, an organizationally approved food inspector whose duties include lighting pilot flames (to make certain that an observant Jew is involved in the cooking), ensuring that fridges are locked (to guarantee that no one can tamper with the items in it, intentionally or accidentally), examining raw ingredients (produce must be washed to ensure it is free of bugs), and signing off on the hechsherim (the certification labels) on packaged products — not all of which are recognized by each certification body. Rates are different for every restaurant, but this supervision and approval costs thousands per year.
It’s also a system that can be hostile to those perceived as outsiders. In 2014, Alex Levy opened ELNA Bistro inside a medical centre in Montreal’s Côte Saint- Luc. Levy is not observant, and his application for kosher certification was rejected by MK and KSR. He appealed KSR’s decision, explaining that there was nothing in their rules prohibiting this: KSR had previously approved three other restaurants with similar ownership. Once Levy was approved by KSR, the first inspector was strict but respectful, taking the time to explain why a particular can of pumpkin couldn’t be used even though it had US kosher certification. The business grew over the next few years until the supervisor was replaced by a less pleasant mashgiach, who came into Levy’s kitchen demanding access to books, cameras, and fridges.
“He didn’t even introduce himself as the new supervisor, and he was walking in my kitchen,” says Levy. Asked why he was being treated with suspicion, the supervisor told him it was because Levy was not observant. On a second visit, things got more heated. “He points at the certificate and he snaps his fingers and says, I remove this. You’re a nobody. You will do as I say or you’re not going to have the certificate.”
For its part, MK said it would approve Levy’s restaurant at triple the rate he was paying KSR. Eventually they settled for the same fee, but without any transparency about rates and policies, the restaurateur was left feeling that the enforcement of kashrut was capricious. (MK did not respond to requests for comment.)
Public health agencies, which also inspect restaurants, often hand out letter grades to inform the public about an establishment’s status, with timelines for fixing minor rule-breaking, which is a restaurant’s responsibility. Kosher certifiers are more interventionist and generally work with restaurants on compliance, helping the operator meet their standards. “Most mistakes that happen are unintentional,” says Richard Rabkin, managing director of COR, “and can be corrected with better forethought and direction.” But when there are serious, intentional violations — for example, sneaking purchases of non-kosher meat — agencies can revoke a restaurant’s kosher certification. If a restaurant loses that, with it goes the trust of the kosher clientele. The only options then are transitioning to a being non-kosher restaurant or going out of business. There’s no coming back.
If monitoring for all this sounds labour intensive, that’s because it is. Some Canadian organizations, including MK and KSR, assign the restaurant’s mashgiach. COR allows restaurateurs to select their own working mashgiach (who works directly in the kitchen and COR must then approve), with additional oversight provided by what’s a called a “route mashgiach”— a COR mashgiach who has several restaurants, generally clustered close together, which they simultaneously oversee — who visits multiple times a day. They, in turn, report to a senior mashgiach in the head office. In 2016, COR launched a mashgiach training course that includes food safety and knife handling education. That’s a lot of labour and bureaucracy that the restaurateur is paying for through fees.
A contemporary tech upgrade to these long-established practices: installing cameras in the kitchen. This allows kosher agencies to both bring down their own labour costs as well as collect documentation in case of infractions. Like all security measures, the cameras are a double-edged sword. Employees don’t like it. But it helps ensure a kitchen’s kosher status and may be used to settle a dispute with a mashgiach, which is in a restaurant’s favour.
The single greatest increased cost to a kosher restaurateur is the requirement of employing a mashgiach, which becomes very pricy if that person only oversees kashrut and does not perform any other kitchen labour. “I’ve seen some [kitchens] where the only function and job for the mashgiach is the kosher supervision,” Klein says. “They literally will not lift a finger and do anything else, where they technically could. And in those cases, they’re a real financial strain on those businesses.” This is, to be clear, not due to religious obligations. “There are plenty of other mashgichim who are very hands-on and are working as if they’re a manager or a cook,” explains Klein. “They’re serving a dual purpose in the restaurant so they’re not bloating the payroll.” This, obviously, is a better situation for the restaurateur, but still an added cost: Klein says that someone in this role “is still going to cost more than a typical restaurant worker.”
In the United States, smaller certification agencies like DC Kosher and Lighthouse Kosher are working to lower this financial barrier. Focused primarily on vegetarian and vegan restaurants whose ingredients require less oversight, DC Kosher provides an easier avenue for businesses that aren’t aimed at a kosher audience but could easily reach them without too much additional effort. “That’s a quality of food that I want to model for our community,” says Rabbi Uri Topolosky, a member of DC Kosher’s kashrut supervision board. “I’m motivated to help out a small business owner when I know it can be a fully kosher operation.”
The volunteer-based DC Kosher charges no fees. Though stressing that he does not oppose the work of the major certification organizations, Topolosky wants to provide another option in order to increase the availability and variety of kosher restaurants. “For some smaller operations, it’s not tenable. They can’t afford to drop another $2,000 to these agencies. It cuts too deeply into their bottom line.”
Topolosky stands behind his Orthodox kosher standards, but he does operate differently than other Orthodox certifiers, relying on collaboration with restaurateurs — for example, working with them to standardize their vegeble-washing processes — and casual visits from community members rather than a clockwork inspection process. Topolosky doesn’t feel the need for daily checks, and would rather practise this as a trust-based partnership than require constant oversight. “The reality,” he says, “is that we don’t need what has become the standard in the kosher world. It’s become a standard to require a kosher supervisor on site all the time. That has not been an easy option for many of these restaurants.”
A small market & small selection
Some kosher restaurants say the lack of competition among suppliers — manufacturers and distributors of items like the feta Rachamim was looking for — is one of their biggest challenges.
“There is no competition in kashrus in Montreal, in terms of meat,” says Steven Lapidus, a professor at Concordia University and an expert in Montreal’s kosher scene. “Most of the kosher beef manufacturers are all owned by the same company.” Mehadrin (which alone distributes 75 percent of Canadian kosher beef) and Shefa effectively have a duopoly on the supply of kosher meat in this country. In addition to the high costs, kosher restaurateurs describe a lack of variety in the goods that are available, but with so few options they must choose from that limited selection and pay when prices rise, which is frequently. “It’s debatable if the market is even big enough for multiple players,” says Manny Azulay, owner of Ely’s Fine Foods in Toronto. “The problem with the kosher guys in Canada is there’s nowhere else to go. It’s not that restaurant A is sourcing chicken from over here and it’s cheaper than restaurant B, who’s sourcing his chicken over there. We’re all buying it from the same guy.”
This isn’t true of just meat: there’s enormous concentration across the kosher food sector nationally. COR and MK don’t just provide mashgiach services; they are also the two largest kosher certifiers of packaged food and kosher slaughtered meat in Canada. “It’s a double-edged sword,” says Klein of YeahThatsKosher. “On one hand, the community probably trusts the option that’s there, the COR or the MK. But it becomes an issue for kosher businesses because they’re not really offered an opportunity to shop around. They don’t have options. So whatever the price is, the price is. And that is in turn reflected in the price of kosher goods.”
A matter of faith
For some who keep kosher, religious adherence is not a question of fair business practices or affordability. “The restaurant business complains a lot about it,” says Ron Gersh, a government relations consultant who worked with a bidder, unsuccessfully, to secure a kosher chicken quota in Ontario. “But this is the business of kosher. You can’t just say, Trust me. That’s not okay for people who keep kosher like myself. You want it at the highest standards. For some- one who is eating kosher, it’s their connection to God. Eating food that is forbidden damages that connection.”
Keeping kosher, but not trusting the health standards of kosher meat producers, Gersh bought his own grass-finished cow and hired a shochet to do the slaughter, at a cost that makes him laugh. “This is what it means to be kosher,” he says. “And this is what God’s people have to do. Everyone knew what they were getting into when they decided to live this lifestyle.”
Lapidus says that hasn’t always been the case. Over the last century, he says, Orthodox standards have become more strict, a phenomenon he attributes to a disconnection from living tradition.
In the wake of the world wars and the Holocaust, says Lapidus, “the tradition of doing what your father and your zayde did was gone. Because most of them were dead. So instead of the mimetic tradition, where you imitate your parents, you went to books.” It took some time for the full effects to be realized: in North America in the ’60s and ’70s, Orthodox Jews were still guided by yeshivot that had been established before the war, which tended to be more liberal. Their eventual waning “led to a reliance on books, which make people more stringent. Because the book doesn’t have a heart, the book doesn’t give exceptions. The book is black and white, and you can’t argue with it.”
For example, says Lapidus, in the ’70s, Orthodox Jews would have one oven, one sink, eat canned vegetables without a hescher, kasher their dishwasher for Passover, and even go to the movies — all behaviour that is now deemed too liberal.
It also took a couple of generations for upward social mobility to kick in, to the point where it was feasible for Jewish households to own more than one oven and pay for all the other infrastructure needed to keep meat and dairy as separate as has become the norm. “You go into houses today, you see two sinks,” says Lapidus. “Back in the day of my grandmother, nobody’s building a second sink. Nobody had the money. You coped with one sink and you managed to be kosher in one sink.”
Speaking recently on The CJN podcast Bonjour Chai, Lapidus explained that MK’s Orthodox standards also place a financial burden on the larger constituency of non-Orthodox Jews. “What I see is a kashrus setup that is not responding to the needs of individuals. One of the problems with contemporary kashrus is it’s very much tied to economic social mobility. Buy the bug-free broccoli for two or three times the price. That’s not fair or egalitarian for the whole community.”
These more stringent standards don’t just affect what happens in home kitchens: they put pressure on every stage of the restaurant supply chain. End consumers — restaurant customers — cannot absorb every price increase. When the economy is strong, people spend money. When it’s not, they don’t. Discretionary spending on dining out is always one of the first casualties of budgetary restraint. The harsh reality is that religious Jews must eat kosher food but are not obliged to dine in restaurants. When it gets too expensive, they stop eating out. This makes restaurateurs terrified of passing their increased costs on to diners. “You end up either eating the increase yourself, which affects your margin,” says Azulay, “or you pass it along and it affects your business because people are not willing to pay for it anymore. Or you eat a little bit and pass on a little bit. All you get is margin erosion, a situation where you’re making less money than you need to survive.”
Despite all these obstacles, Rachamim is optimistic. Eisenbergs started out as a non-kosher restaurant. Then they had the opportunity to open in the JCC, which required becoming kosher. “That was a big decision,” says Rachamim. “Restaurants are challenging. Being kosher is definitely more challenging. But going kosher for us was the best decision for our company. As soon as we became kosher, we realized that we levelled up and we’re one of the top vendors in kosher.”
For Rachamim, the smaller market, though it creates challenges, is an advantage. “The reality of a kosher business is: it’s niche. It’s a small pool. So there’s less competition. Because of that there’s opportunity, and it’s easy to flourish. I think if you have a good product in the kosher game, you should be okay.”
