Aren’t Brochachos Just Adorable? “We just love the place,” says Mihaly. “I never understood why people go to Disneyland. I like a place where you don’t need Mickey. For us, it’s about the food and our own space.” “We go out of the way to make it not like your regular American-Jewish restaurant. The tables, our menu, all about the atmosphere,” says his wife. She says they’re working on a project to make it their own restaurant. “We want to have like a whole wall dedicated to food porn. All the stuff we got into trouble over.” How does the restaurant feel about food porn? Mihaly: “It’s like a family.” He turns to Gail. “You’ve got this beautiful daughter, so beautiful, and you get very upset if I don’t kiss her at least three times a day, right?” She nods and he kisses his daughter. “That’s what we are here. And the food we are serving. It’s all about family.” Gail: “It’s just like an embrace, all that excitement and emotion we share. It’s our way of sharing love with the world.” The business plan. What they have in common with Disney is their business model. You can rent a table for $12.95, or you can buy it for $49 a month, and at your table you can do anything. “Anything,” says Schnellenberg, who adds, “You can only do a few things there, but you don’t care. I don’t care, because it’s my restaurant. But you’re with your family, your kids. You are free to do anything.” But aren’t there always problems at the restaurant? “Like what?” asks Schnellenberg. “I had a complaint. I said, ‘I’ll help you.’” He turns to Brocha. “Did I help you with your problem?” The couple start giggling. Schnellenberg laughs, too. “Did I help you with your problem? My problem is solved.” How do you create a Jewish-family vibe? Schnellenberg: “I don’t know if we do it well enough. We try, but… I need a better place. We need our own place. We did a family dinner once, just two kids and the parents. But what would have been a better option is an actual family dinner.” The menu Lichtenstein: “Every restaurant is a Jewish restaurant now.” He says that when the food writers came and saw what he served, “we were getting in trouble over the fact that it’s not Ashkenazic cuisine. It’s all of them. You can’t get it without talking about being Jewish. We’re not an ethnic restaurant, we are a culture.” He looks around the crowded room. “This is America. We’re Americans.” Brocha: “You have to tell a story. You can’t just serve boring things.” Brocha believes the place and the food should have a personality. “The way it looks should mean something. Why do you want us to come here? You want us to come because this food has to be special, because this place has to be something we enjoy. Not to forget about Jewish tradition. We have the Passover menu. But you can also get a chicken sandwich.” She talks about her grandmother. “She always said, ‘What can I cook that they can’t find in any restaurant?’ We’re going in that direction.” The menu includes everything from hummus to gefilte fish, to smoked salmon and matzo ball soup. “Jews have a way of taking all kinds of things and coming up with something incredible.” The kitchen Gail: “I have an aversion to being in the kitchen. I have a fear of getting hurt.” Brocha is more outgoing. “I like it here, but it takes me out of my comfort zone. I always felt that the kitchen was the place I could be the most emotional. You can be a Jewish person without being in the kitchen, right? You can be a Jew all you want without being in the kitchen.” Brocha laughs. “In other words, get out of my kitchen.” The couple agree. “I hate the kitchen,” says Schnellenberg. “I’m fine in the kitchen.” What do you cook? Brocha: “Let me get you something to eat first.” She puts a plate of warm matzo ball soup in front of her. “I’m from Hungary, so everything about the Jewish experience I know. For some reason, it makes my parents happy. So it’s not that I made it up, but it’s not their thing.” She also makes her grandmother’s stuffed cabbage and her mother’s chicken potpie. “We do kosher like they would have eaten it, meaning it’s not a lot of butter.” But there are other things on the menu. “We do the Passover menu every year.” But the restaurant also gets complaints about using oil for frying. “Every restaurant serves oil,” she says. “There’s no reason not to do it, unless you want to get into a fight with a bunch of people and lose customers. They use olive oil, but it’s not supposed to be good for you. When you’re cooking it, use olive oil, and you’re good. “What can you do if your restaurant is too big to know how many people are here? How do you know how many people to cook for, so you can tell them how much food to give them?” She adds that when she was in the kitchen, she’d find herself thinking about her husband and daughter, and then she’d think about how they’re going to have to go on their own and do their own thing. She thinks about how she was a rebellious kid who always skipped Hebrew school, but also about how she became a lawyer and how she always made sure to come home for her daughter. Schnellenberg: “I like to come here. I feel at home here. When I come here, I feel like I’m still in the same place I was in Europe. I still go to this restaurant every day, and this is a place where I know everybody. The fact that we’re a Jewish restaurant is an important part of it.” What do you think about having this whole wall dedicated to food porn? “Let’s have one side of the room for women, one side of the room for men, and have a little bit of both. It’s a small place. We make a lot of noise here. So let’s give people a sense of our culture.” He says he’s working on a video clip that takes place in a family restaurant. He shows his phone. “We’re taking this video of a baby being born. You can see it’s a Jewish baby. What if we took it to Disney World? We can say you’re watching a Jewish baby being born and you’re watching it here, at our place. Let’s call it Jewish culture. “I don’t think it’s about giving people the food they want. Food isn’t a drug. Food is something that nourishes people and keeps them going.” And he looks over at his daughter, who he thinks will be a famous lawyer. “I want to be just like her when I grow up.” At least they’ll both get free babysitting. In a way, Kiddush-Restaurant is a tribute to its creator. “Jewish food is a different thing. It’s the Jewish version of everything else,” says Brocha. “My father always said, ‘This is Jewish food, what you see, no one else can do that.’” Mihaly: “You don’t want to make something that’s going to make other people jealous.” And that might be why this isn’t a restaurant for everyone. It’s a place where people who feel rejected by the world can come and belong. It’s a place for people who don’t have anywhere to go that fills their soul. The food, the setting, the sense of community. All of this makes you feel Jewish. Of course, it’s not all about the food. There are people, lots of them. “We have a big problem in Brooklyn, with the Jewish food,” says Brocha. “I really want to go and support a restaurant. I could go to Katz’s, but they don’t have the same vibe. “When we say our menu, we mean it. It’s not like someone wrote down a few dishes and made it kosher. This is how they did it in the old country, because you can’t go to a grocery store and get it.” The atmosphere at Kiddush is what they call “ghetto chic.” “The food is not exactly kosher,” says Schnellenberg. “The menu has it all written down, every recipe, and it’s not something that someone made up.” Schnellenberg wants people to remember where they are, so people don’