A Lubovitch bagel store vs. a mainstream bagelry?

Question by sylvester: A Lubovitch bagel store vs. a mainstream bagelry?
i was going to a hardware store i knew of when i thought to text google and see if any were closer. i’m in brooklyn, of eastern parkway in crown heights. so i went to a lubovitch jewish-owned/run hardware store. next door there was a bagel place, so i went in. the bagels were much softer than all the other specialty bagel places in brooklyn like bergen bagels and la bagel delight, kinda just like bread. i’m not even sure it had been boiled. there was no butter, the cream cheese tasted a little different (more sour maybe?), there were three avocado options, some premade eggs and pancakes and maybe some latkas. and there was a sink for washing hands i presume. so i guess i’m curious about the difference between a real jewish bagel place in a jewish neighborhood where they speak yiddish, and a more mainstream bagel place where i see mostly latinos working? i saw a lot of eggs and avocado. oh course there’s no pork. what about the sink? thanks to anyone more versed in lubovitch culture. i really should be more outgoing, but i guess i’m intimidated. these guys all look so smart and stoic with their traditional garb and beards with unshorn corners. thanks

Best answer:

Answer by Michelle R
Honestly – bagel shops are either kosher or non-kosher, based on the foods they sell and the rabbinic supervision they employ — but there are plenty of kosher bagel shops with non-Jewish workers. In fact, many Dunkin’ Donuts franchises are kosher in towns with large Jewish populations. All it means is that they won’t sell you any non-kosher foods there, and if they serve dairy products (including butter), there won’t be any meat for sale. The bagels themselves shouldn’t be different in any way – it’s a pretty standard recipe. The sink is indeed for hand-washing, because Jewish law dictates that we ritually wash our hands before eating bread.

There’s no big difference between kosher establishments – a Chassidic-owned dairy restaurant may only serve “cholov yisroel” dairy products (milk, cheese and ice cream that have gone through a stricter supervision process – they often don’t taste as good as their mainstream counterparts, but that’s largely because it’s a captive audience so there’s no competition between companies to make them better), but the recipes themselves are unlikely to be different for religious reasons. There’s no kosher-related reason they would not boil the bagels, for example. The biggest reason for difference between kosher and non-kosher restaurants in general, aside from the ingredients, is that most Orthodox cafe owners have never stepped foot inside a non-kosher restaurant – so they don’t know what the accepted standards of food service and presentation are in the non-Jewish world. Most of the best-rated kosher restaurants in the US were started by people who are baalei teshuva (Jews who were not raised religious and became observant later in life) – because they had eaten in nonkosher fine restaurants and wanted to replicate that experience in the Jewish world.

In other words, if the food wasn’t up to par, blame the chef and not the kosher supervisor 🙂

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