The BMG kitchen’s output would intimidate the hardiest of souls, but as Eli spent those early days watching Aryeh cook up a storm, he assured himself he would have several years to apprentice.

“My assumption was that even once Spilman transitioned to catering, there’d be someone else who would become head chef, and I would become the assistant,” recalls Eli.

Yet just a year in, he went from the frying pan to the fire — the previous team left and Eli was duly installed as head chef, responsible for the nourishment of the thousands of talmidim.

“He became the rosh yeshivah of the kitchen in record time,” recalls a friend of Eli’s. If he was feeling overwhelmed, he didn’t show it.

“If you want to maintain a productive kitchen, the key is to stay calm,” he says.

Being the coolheaded one in a hot kitchen also draws disquieted talmidim seeking a place to unload.

“He’s a listening ear for a lot of bochurim who need someone to talk to,” says Shabsi Sorsher, Eli’s chavrusa. “He’s understanding and sympathetic, and people who are going through something gravitate toward him.”

Eli has designed his operation to minimize any extra stress.

“All our meals are prepared 24 hours in advance,” Eli explains. “Because of the sheer size of our operation, we don’t want to run into problems at crunch time. Having everything running a full day in advance of production time helps maintain a very positive atmosphere, alleviates a lot of unnecessary stress, and allows us to avoid last minute crises.”

Eli remembers when a blackout hit the yeshivah. The kitchen had generators, but the lights were out for several hours, which hampered operations. Yet as soon as power returned, they were able to roll out fully prepared food from the kitchen.

ON the day of our tour, the kitchen’s aromas are particularly enticing. A yeshivah favorite — hot, pulled barbecue pastrami — is on the menu for tomorrow’s lunch, and the aroma emanating from the 2,000 pounds of meat and sauce sitting in the huge, industrial-sized vats and mixing bowls are enough to get anyone’s mouth watering.

(The yeshivah serves a fleishig lunch and a dairy dinner, a tradition dating back to its founding in 1943. The most common theory is that the protein-packed meat meals give talmidim more energy to learn, though rumors persist that Rav Aharon Kotler had another reason in mind when he instituted the policy: Many kollel men were living in such dire poverty that if they weren’t given a hearty meal in yeshivah, they might not have eaten properly at all.)

The foresight of both the BMG executive and kitchen teams played a crucial role for the Lakewood community four years ago, when it became clear that thousands of couples and families who planned to join their parents for Pesach would be staying put because of Covid restrictions. Led by Rabbi Aaron Kotler, president emeritus of the yeshivah, and under Eli’s direction, teams of socially distanced volunteers cooked, assembled, and packaged boxes containing ten beautiful Yom Tov meals for a family of five, which were made available to anyone in the community at a total cost of $349.

“That was one of the most meaningful projects we ever took on,” says Eli, “and one that I’m still getting feedback from today. We worked around the clock for eight days straight to cook 50,000 meals. From young couples who’d never made Pesach before to families who had parents in the hospital or laid up in bed, people were desperate.”

Not that Operation Pesach wasn’t without its own drama: When the cable of the kitchen lift snapped, leaving the team with no way to transport heavy loads to and from the loading docks, the entire operation was imperiled.

“Elevator companies were only servicing clients who had previous contracts with them, and so we reached out to nursing home owners who used these elevator companies in their homes to convince them to come to us and help thousands of families make Pesach,” Eli recalls.

Finally, a company sent down a maintenance man, and a cable was shipped in via Uber from a Brooklyn warehouse  on a late Friday afternoon. A psak came in that the non-Jew could continue working on Shabbos if need be, and by Motzaei Shabbos, the Pesach Box program was up and running.

“I still get feedback today,” Eli says. “A woman who stayed in my house for Shabbos for a simchah just a few weeks ago. She said that she received the box a few years ago and had sent an email thanking us back then, but was elated that she now had the opportunity to thank us in person.”

While the Pesach Box program was a definite highlight for Eli, he sees tremendous satisfaction from his everyday activities, too, churning out tons of food and drink to talmidim who use the food to fuel the massive output of Torah that Lakewood is synonymous with.

And it’s not only the talmidim that he serves, Eli says with a smile. Every morning, the BMG hanhalah, including three out of its four roshei yeshivah, eat breakfast at private table set up in the kitchen, and Eli personally serves them.

Two years ago, when Eli celebrated his son’s bar mitzvah, all four roshei yeshivah came to wish mazel tov and join in the simchah, their way of showing gratitude to a talmid of the yeshivah who continues to play an integral role.

Over 2,000 lbs

cutlets used for poppers, one of our most popular lunches

9,000

approximate number of meals served per day

300–360 dozen

eggs used per day

1,500–2,000 lbs

approximate amount of beef stew we serve for a  meat lunch

75,000

approximate amount of cups of coffee per week. That’s almost 4 million cups of coffee per year!

Over 200 lbs

pasta used for a single dinner

Upwards of 150

cases of chicken used per week

Hundreds of gallons of coffee creamer per year-we serve a fleishig lunch, and the oilem need their coffee before second seder!

Over 300

pies- served for pizza dinners, one of our most popular meals

Flavored with Love

Novominsk

Motty Banash and Moishe Schoenfeld

IN the basement of the Novominsk yeshivah,

just down the hall from the mikveh and adjoining exercise room, we meet Motty Banash, the yeshivah’s long-serving chef, looking splendid in his thick spectacles, paisley-print shirt, and oversized, double-breasted pinstriped jacket that fits his larger-than-life personality. Welcoming us into his kitchen, Motty wastes no time informing us that he’s been with the yeshivah for 34 years, during which he has “cooked meals for my bochurim, three times a day — breakfast, lunch, and supper, Shabbos and Yom Tov.”

And while just this past Elul the yeshivah brought in Chef Moishe Schoenfeld to lighten Motty’s load and take over the supper and Shabbos-meal responsibilities — it’s still very much Motty’s kitchen. In case anyone doubted that, Motty affixed an Empire State license plate emblazoned with “BIG BOSS” on the wall near his “office” — a small metal and wooden desk in the corner of the kitchen littered with “From Motty’s Kitchen” notepads and a bulky stereo system taking up whatever room is left.

Getting down to business, Motty offers me a seat while he leans back into a vintage,  green leather executive chair, and begins sharing his story, not stopping or pausing until we stand up several minutes later.

“I came to the yeshivah in 1990, to the old building at 1569 47th street,” he starts off, his exuberant voice tinged with nostalgia, “and I cooked over there in a little basement in a tiny four-by-four cubicle — without any freezers, fridges, or ovens. I don’t know how I managed, but I did, and I made breakfast, lunch and supper, Shabbos, and Yom Tov.”

Two convection ovens (one milchig and one fleishig) were the kitchen’s first innovations, purchased by Rabbi Lipa Brennan, the yeshivah’s executive director, whom Motty describes as “the best and nicest boss possible, whom I thank Hashem every day for, and a person who wanted to make my life easier.”

They still didn’t have a freezer, though, so Motty rented commercial freezer space from a freezer facility on McDonald Avenue, until Rabbi Brennan brought him a chest freezer as well — which promptly broke as soon as the warranty expired.

“I don’t know how we lasted there, but we did, and I have many great memories from my 17 years there.”

In 2007, the yeshivah moved into its magnificent 72,000-square-foot campus on 17th Avenue and 60th Street, and Motty came right along.

“It’s a great place to work,” he says with satisfaction. “And the boys are very nice to me. I cook excellent food for them. Someone once made a cheshbon that I must have fed over 10,000 bochurim, and that’s not counting the summer camps in which I cook. And I always tried very hard to make them happy. In all my years, the food never came out more than five minutes late, I always had enough — and it was always good. I also sometimes splurged — I got them lunches and went a little out of the yeshivah budget, but the bochurim knew that I care, and my boss didn’t bother me about it.”

His caring extends beyond splurging on gourmet meals. “If a bochur isn’t feeling well and comes to me late in the morning for some butter or cream cheese to have with his breakfast, legally, I’m not supposed to give it out past eleven, but what should I do? These are heilige bochurim” — he says this in a thick Boro Park accent — “learning Hashem’s Torah, and I want them to have a good time in this life too, so I accommodate them. This is the sechar that I’m taking along with me.

“And I’ll tell you something more — these bochurim are special,” he continues. “Whenever I walk outside, these bochurim are talking in learning — maybe not during breakfast, because they are still a little tired, but lunch and supper, you watch them and they’re arguing in learning as they wait in line to get their food.”

The nachas he has from the bochurim is evident, and he shares that a few years back, the bochurim expressed the affection back.

“Baruch Hashem, I’m still here, having a great time with the bochurim,” he says. “Every year, when it’s my birthday, they make me a whole party — they decorate my office here in the kitchen with balloons. In the dining room itself, they sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ One year they even they put up an inflatable tube man that flopped about as they sang. And they present me with a nice, big, fluffy cake.”

His monologue over, Motty doesn’t wait for a reaction before stretching and standing up to smooth out the batter for a marble cake that he’ll serve the next day as an extra treat during lunch.

Just over the metal barrier delineating milchigs and fleishigs, Chef Moishe Schoenfeld is hard at work, frying hundreds of thinly sliced pieces of chicken cutlets that will shortly be put into club bread and wraps for a hearty supper of schnitzel sandwiches. Moishe may be new to the kitchen here in Novominsk, but he’s an experienced professional in his own right, having worked as a private chef for five years and overseeing the food operation in a summer camp.

While Motty brings established, tried-and-true flavors to the yeshivah, Moishe adds a spice of his own, helping ensure that the menu is faithful to tradition, but also contemporary. He strolls around the dining room during mealtime, taking mental notes on what the bochurim are eating — and just as importantly, what they aren’t. His informal polling (and observing) yields some surprising results.

“Our bochurim are getting more health conscious than they were in the past,” he says, sliding yet another piece of schnitzel into a wrap, as if to illustrate. “They’ll still eat fried chicken, but in a whole wheat wrap instead of a baguette.”

Moishe also says that older bochurim eat soup, younger bochurim not so much — with chicken soup being an exception and a favorite across all age groups.

“Bochurim are also getting into salad,” he says. Noticing my disbelief that Boro Park bochurim learning in a yeshivah are developing vegan tendencies, he doubles down with a laugh. “I’m just telling you what I see,” he says. “I cook for both girls and boys. I see the girls eating the cholent and the boys going for the salads.”

Returning to Motty, who’s fed hundreds of thousands of meals to tens of thousands of bochurim, I wonder aloud: Does he have a personal career highlight? Motty doesn’t bat an eyelash.

“Of course I do,” he says emphatically. “The highlight is when you walk into the dining room and you see empty plates. That is the greatest feeling.”

Over 10,000

bochurim fed

Favorite Soup Chicken soup, an oldie but goodie

Trending today’s bochurim want healthier food, like whole wheat wraps and salads

Stepping Up to the Plate

Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin

Dovi Zeitlin, Avrohom Wagschal, and Meir Youseflaleh

Taking up almost an entire city block

in the heart of Flatbush’s bustling Coney Island Avenue, the proud brick edifice of Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin dwarfs neighboring buildings. In 2001, Dovi Zeitlin walked up the front steps for a meeting with its venerated rosh yeshivah, Rav Aharon Schechter ztz”l.

A few days earlier, he had met with Rabbi Avraham Fruchthandler (his father-in-law’s chavrusa and  close friend), Rabbi Tuvia Obermeister, and Rabbi Ephraim Feuer, who comprised Chaim Berlin’s executive board. They wanted to to discuss with him the possibility of his taking responsibility for the yeshivah’s food operation, which meant overseeing daily meals for over 2,000 people, divided between the Coney Island and Avenue I campuses. He would be feeding students ranging in age from elementary school all the way to the kollel divisions and staff.  Just from a numbers perspective, it was a formidable ask, but during his meetings with the Chaim Berlin hanhalah, the task became doubly daunting.

“The Rosh Yeshivah told me that bochurim were seen entering local eateries during the yeshivah’s supper time,” Dov recalls, “and he expressed his concern. He wanted the yeshivah food to be as appealing to the bochurim as the local takeout was, and he wanted to make changes to the food service.”

Two decades in, he presides over the entire food operation in Chaim Berlin, covering two locations, each headed by an independent chef. We meet him and Avrohom Wagschal, the chef in Chaim Berlin’s Avenue I elementary school in the downstairs of its building, where we navigate the kitchen to the sounds of bubbling oil, oven doors opening and closing, and pans clinking down on commercial rolling racks. We hurry through the maze of walk-in refrigerators; a milchig and fleishig kitchen; and we even meet the back-office staff, two women who take obvious pride in their work.

It’s a quick tour and Dovi keeps his on eye on the clock; lunchtime is coming. If Dovi has a secret sauce to his operation, it’s his insistence that come mealtime, it’s all systems go.

“I always tell my staff that our whole expenditure — all our equipment, recipes, and the food network we run — boils down to those 15 to 20 minutes of mealtime. We want to see that when the student comes down to the serving table, he has what he needs and it moves quick.”

The first shift of elementary school students are about to come down for lunch, and Mishpacha tour notwithstanding, Dovi wants to be sure that the students have what they need — when they need it. We watch a staffer take a bag of thinly sliced potatoes and dump them into a deep fryer, where the sizzling oil fries them to perfection. It’s barely five minutes to serving time.

“I don’t want mounds of fries sitting out, we want everything fresh,” Dovi explains. “So we fry one batch right before they come down and then continue frying as they go, constantly replenishing the supply.”

We step out of the kitchen into the elementary dining room and watch the system — oiled as well as the fries — in real time. At 11:20, the first group of about 150 youngsters bounce down the steps and into the dining room, take their conveniently placed foam lunch trays at the entrance to the dining room, and make a beeline for the buffet tables, where the uniformed wait staff dish up cheese pretzels, (fresh) french fries, and tuna and vegetables. A soup station offering  chow mein soup is available too, and Avrohom ladles out bowls to any interested youngsters.

The whole serving process lasts just a few minutes, after which the kids take their heaping plates to the tables, eat accompanied by happy chatter, and conclude with the menahel leading them in a loud and heartfelt Bircas Hamazon. Dov mentions that seeing hundreds of little children earnestly singing bentshing together is a beautiful thing; even the kitchen workers are moved. Quickly as they came, the students, now happily satiated, are running back up the steps.

As soon as the last of the boys scampers off, the kitchen staff rushes in, peels off the used tablecloths — revealing two more clean ones underneath — and the pans at the food station are refilled, just in time for the next shift of hungry students to come down. For the next hour, it’s wash, rinse, and repeat as Dovi, Avrohom, and the staff man their posts until the last shift of talmidim make their way up the stairs. At that point there’s a break in the action, which we use to head over to the yeshivah’s main Coney Island Avenue campus, a short five-minute (and five-traffic-light) drive away.

WE have some time before the mesivta boys end shiur and first seder is over, so we settle down in Dovi’s office, where he tells us how he got to this point in the food chain.  He was just a 16-year-old camper in Tiferes Shulem (Nadvorna), a chassidishe camp in Woodridge, New York, when the energetic bochur started assisting — in an unofficial capacity — with some of the maintenance needs in camp. He stocked the canteen, oversaw deliveries, managed the kitchen staff, and boasted the ultimate status symbol — a hefty key ring.

When Dovi got back to the city after that summer, he was eager to continue helping out. The Nadvorna Yeshiva, in which he was a talmid, didn’t have its own kitchen, so the meals were prepared in the home of the Nadvorna Rebbe, Rav Shlomo Leifer shlita.

The operation was small — there were just 100 bochurim in the yeshivah — but the budget was even smaller, so Dovi got resourceful, heading out to local stores on his bike. He would stop at the various shops, negotiate prices, and wait for workers to clear out the old challah from the shelf — whereupon Dovi would swoop in, transport the loaves back to yeshivah, and put up French toast for the excited bochurim.

One day, the Rebbe called him into his private study. “Efsher kenst kuchen far der yeshivah — can you cook for the yeshivah?” he wanted to know. The yungerman who had served as the cook until then had to leave in the middle of the zeman, and the yeshivah needed someone, quite literally, to put bread on the table. Dovi happily obliged.

Today, he chuckles recalling his first official job.

“I did the best I could as a 17-year-old with no real food experience,” he says, laughing. “I borrowed recipes from the Nadvorna Rebbetzin and tried to make sure that breakfast, lunch, and supper went out every day.” He still uses the Rebbetzin’s kugel recipe in his behemoth operation today, though he was forced to modify it slightly to suit mass production. “I call it Nadvorna-inspired,” he says.

Dovi stayed on as Nadvorna’s cook for the next few years before serving in a smorgasbord of different culinary positions over the following 20 years or so. He managed a catering business, helped out with shabbatons and hotel programs, operated a local café, oversaw a restaurant upstate, and was working full-time in China Glatt, a Chinese restaurant in the heart of Boro Park, when the call came in from Chaim Berlin.

“I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” Dovi says of his first days managing the Chaim Berlin food operation, which included staff, kitchen, and dining facilities in the two different buildings. It was a colossal operation, but he threw himself into it and immediately whipped up some changes.

“When I came, gefilte fish and farfel was on the menu,” he says by way of example.

Those dishes were replaced with foods more appealing to the contemporary palate, such as schnitzel and a mean Chinese chicken (which continues to be a favorite two decades later).

Making the most of his initial modest budget, he introduced variety to the meals by adding some inexpensive yet nourishing items like baked apples, and brought in more produce to ensure that there were healthier options. Today, a rolling rack of individual plastic salad bowls filled with precut vegetables and romaine lettuce are available for the taking.

“We found that prepackaging our salads is neater, more efficient, and cuts down on food waste,” Dovi says by way of explanation, “because it’s contained, and we don’t have plates heaping with romaine lettuce being thrown out.”

On the logistical end, Dovi hired additional staff to ensure that lines moved quickly and efficiently, and made practical changes to the dining room set-up so the process wouldn’t be cumbersome for his young customers. “Even simple changes that we instituted — for example, we moved the salad bar from being flush against the wall to two feet away, allowing talmidim to access it from both sides, cut down significantly on waiting time.”

Our conversation is cut short when Meir Youseflaleh, the chef here in the Coney Island campus, approaches. After the requisite introductions, he asks Dovi to come into the kitchen. One of the kitchen assistants was working an oversized wok, frying bite-sized chicken strips to Asian perfection for that evening’s dinner, when they realized the results weren’t what they should have been, he says. Could Dovi take a look?

Together, we head over to the kitchen, where Dovi diagnoses the problem: The oil should have been preheated to 400 degrees prior to placing the chicken in, and he gently lets his staff know before we move over to the milchig side. There, the pace is picking up. The staff prepares for the bochurim who will be heading down after first seder. Racks and racks of in-house made pizza bagels  — mushroom, vegetable, and plain — are being churned out of the oven, and salad-bar toppings are being packaged in single containers and stacked onto serving tables.

The dining room staff takes up their positions at the serving tables just in time; at one, hundreds of bochurim start pouring in. Within minutes, pans are emptied out onto waiting plates and another batch of freshly baked pizzas exit the ovens for round two. The scene here is definitely more mature, the crowd less colorful, the decibel level a bit lower, and the bentshing more serious than their elementary school counterparts. As quickly as they come, the bochurim head back upstairs, fueled for another long seder.

Dovi smiles, the satisfaction evident on his face. He shares that a few weeks into that first zeman of his Chaim Berlin career, he got word that Rabbi Avraham Fruchthandler, the yeshivah’s president, wanted to speak to him. Dovi made his way from the underbelly of the building where he operates up to the executive offices, where Rabbi Fruchthandler proceeded to give his new hire a hug and kiss.

“Dovi” he said, “I thought you’d observe for months and months before we’d see any changes, but I see it’s been just a few weeks, and I want to say thank you for everything that you’ve done.”

That message was reinforced shortly after at a Chaim Berlin dinner, when Dovi waited with hundreds of talmidim as Rav Aharon Shechter ztz”l entered the hall. Attendees surged forward to greet their rosh yeshivah, who looked around — and upon spotting Dovi, motioned for him to come closer. The crowd parted for the yeshivah’s food director, and the Rosh Yeshivah clasped his hand.

Looking at him with his trademark smile, the Rosh Yeshivah exclaimed, “Ah! My shutaf!”

“The Rosh Yeshivah always called me his ‘shutaf,’ his partner,” Dovi remembers  fondly. “From my first day on the job all those years ago, he made me feel valued and showed me how important my role is to the yeshivah.”

Rav Aharon’s legacy is maintained today by his successor, Rav Shlomo Halioua, and Dovi says he is just as concerned that the yeshivah has the kemach it needs to fuel its Torah. The Rosh Yeshivah is intimately involved with the welfare of his bochurim, and takes a personal interest in making sure that all of the weekday, Shabbos, and Yom Tov meals are respectable and appropriate. “The Rosh Yeshivah takes time out of his busy schedule to call and thank me for my work after every Yom Tov,” he says. “Can you imagine?”

It’s evident that the warmth, friendship, and appreciation that Dovi has received and continues to receive from those two gedolei Yisrael is what keeps him going strong after all these years.

By the Month

64,800

Eggs

39,430

8 oz cups of milk

3,350

Pounds of potatoes

2,000

Total fed daily between students and staff

1475

Of whom are students

Most memorable compliment

When parents call me to ask how to cook certain dishes so they can replicate our food at home

Food for Thought

Ner Yisroel

Daniel Levy

Lunchtime in Ner Yisroel is over, dinner isn’t scheduled for a few hours, and Chef Daniel Levy, bedecked in his black Ner Israel Rabbinical College chef’s coat, has some time before his personal learning seder begins at 4:30. We’re on our way to Daniel’s kitchen headquarters when we’re interrupted by a teenage bochur. He has a request for Daniel: It turns out tomorrow night’s supper is chicken poppers, and the bochur wants to know if Daniel can make sure that he gets a double portion.

Daniel listens, nods, jots down the bochur’s name, and assures him he’ll get that double portion. The bochur thanks him and walks away with his shoulders squared and an extra bounce (or pop?) in his step. Daniel turns back to us.

“That’s my goal here,” Daniel says, “to feed the bochurim and make sure that each one feels like someone cares about him. They know if they tell me something, I’ll do my best to accommodate.”

It was an impromptu lesson into Daniel’s daily grind; his mission here is to serve — primarily food, but also answering any need that may arise.

As we continue through the idyllic campus, it’s evident that even if a few of the buildings dotting the 55-year-old campus have aged, life in this oasis of Torah remains vivacious. The beis medrash is full to capacity, its roar audible even outside its sturdy brick walls. Well after shiur has ended, bochurim are seen escorting their rebbeim to their homes on Yeshiva Lane (where many of the Ner Yisroel faculty members reside), utilizing the precious few minutes to speak in learning.

But while the beis medrash is the campus’s crown jewel, a yeshivah needs kemach to fuel its Torah. So just a few yards from the main beis medrash stands the newly erected, multimillion-dollar dining and kitchen facility, completed in 2021. The dining room is spacious, airy, and bright, and boasts two large cafeteria-style windows that open onto its gleaming kitchen.

Once we’re inside, Daniel quickly surveys his operation before telling us that his culinary journey began as a result of an accident — fairly ironic, considering that today he is reputed among yeshivah chefs to have such superb organizational skills. He takes us back in time to 2006, when he was a 15-year-old lifeguard in Camp Govoha, until an accident and the subsequent cast on his hand effectively halted his lifeguarding career.

When life gives you lemons, the adage goes, make lemonade, and Daniel wasn’t one to stay sour. He may not have been able to dive into a pool with a broken hand, but the cast made a great oven mitt. So he headed off to the camp kitchen, to make lemonade — and chicken, and pasta, and deli sandwiches, plenty of deep-fried chicken, cholent, and everything else hungry bochurim would want to eat after a day spent baking in the sun. He loved it.

“It was awesome serving and helping people,” Daniel recalls.

The Govoha kitchen became the very first course in what would become a labor of love for him. It wasn’t only his first exposure to cooking, but also to running a large-scale kitchen. Even then, Daniel started collecting tips and tricks, which he would store in a mental cookbook of sorts, eventually employing them all in running the operation at Ner that is considered the gold standard among yeshivah chefs. Daniel tells us the first piece of advice to be indexed.

“One of the first things I learned in Camp Govoha — the hard wawy — was the golden rule of transporting food,” he says, laughing. “Pull, don’t push! I was pushing a rolling cart with a pot of soup for 300 campers to break the fast after Tishah B’Av, when a small pebble got caught in one of the wheels. I kept on pushing, and the cart tipped over, sending the contents of the whole pot splattering over the camp’s walkway.”

The next two summers, he returned to Govoha as part of the official kitchen staff and then moved on to Camp Romimu. Romimu’s 800 camper population was more than double Govoha’s, and it allowed Daniel a taste of a large-scale operation.

“Yitzy Niassoff, whom I worked for when I was in Romimu, taught me many tricks of the trade, including how to manage labor,” Daniel says.

That year, the Romimu kitchen was staffed by Muslim Pakistani exchange students enrolled in American universities. The summer break afforded them an opportunity to earn some cash, and Romimu invited them to join their kitchen crew. Providentially, that year Ramadan fell out during the summer, so Daniel didn’t have to worry about his staff eating on the job.

“It was there that I learned how to create recipes that a staff can follow,” he says. “The secret to a camp recipe is that it has to be presented in the simplest terms possible. So measurements have to be in jars or bottles — for example, two jars of mayonnaise and one bottle of oil. Giving measurements any other way confuses them, and you’ll have to be on top of them to make sure it comes out right. Keep it simple and they can execute it.”

After the summer in Camp Romimu, Daniel moved on to The Zone, Oorah’s kiruv camp, where he trained under Mike Mandel, fondly known as “Uncle Mike.”

“We were cooking for 950 people in a brand-new, state-of-the-art kitchen with brand-new equipment,” he says. “I learned how to manage a large multi-campus operation there.”

That included learning how to transport bulk. Once, he shipped a pot of soup for Shabbos in a Cambro to a second location, but the kitchen staff there didn’t unload it, and it remained in the truck for 25 hours. When the workers entered the truck Motzaei Shabbos, the soup was still piping hot.

After that summer at Oorah, Daniel was ready to get into the kitchen full time. He called Aryeh Spilman, who was then the executive chef in Lakewood’s Beth Medrash Govoha, and asked him if he knew of any job opportunities. He did; actually, Aryeh told him, he was looking for an assistant.

It was 2010 when Aryeh brought Daniel on board at the BMG kitchen. Daniel looks back fondly on his BMG days, crediting the yeshivah and Aryeh for his culinary shteiging.

“My experience in BMG surpassed anything I’ve seen,” he says. “It was pressurizing, systematic and executed to perfection, but we still looked for ways to improve.”

Daniel took copious notes after every meal, noting what went right and what didn’t, and what he could improve on.

“Aryeh also taught how important it is to be attentive to detail and keep things mesudar. For example, if a pot isn’t cleaned or stored properly, it can throw the whole operation off. If your team is expecting the sugar to be in one place, but the day before it was haphazardly placed elsewhere because that was the most convenient spot for it at the time, your staff will see it’s not where it’s meant to be, and simply give up rather than look for it.”

Daniel remembers a piece of advice Spilman gave him that he still savors to this day. “He told me that when you come in the morning, don’t tell yourself that you’re leaving at four no matter what, and that everything has to fit it into your shift. Rather, ask yourself how you can accomplish everything in the best way so that by the time four o clock comes by, you’ll be done.”

Daniel asserts that he puts his mentor’s advice to good use every day, but he recalls one delicious anecdote where he really mastered it. It was summer bein hazmanim, and he was cooking for a 1,300-boy mesivta camp in Vermont.

“I looked at my menu and saw four items — cholent, hot poppers, sesame chicken, and meat gravy — that had to get cooked that day, with just one 100-pound kettle to get it all done. And we had to complete it within one kitchen shift!

“The time pressure wouldn’t allow me anytime to clean out the kettle between the different foods, so we had to cook the items in the order that made sense for the taste and time.”

Configuring the sequence of the food prep would have made for a demanding logic game question on the LSAT. The seasoned Daniel was up for the challenge. He charted out a plan and then executed it to perfection.

“The pepper steak went first because it’s sweet, and a dark color. It could precede the sesame sauce, which can have residual sweetness and retain some of the gravy’s color. Only after that did we do the poppers, because you don’t want that fiery spice in the previous two recipes. Then, after frying 100 pounds of poppers, we put up the cholent, which can have the sweetness of the gravy and chicken and the zest of the popper sauce — plus it needs the longest cooking time, so we had our three other recipes out without rushing the cholent.”

Six hours later, a perfect steak gravy, pans of sweet and suspiciously dark sesame chicken, flaming poppers, and a flavorful cholent were on his kitchen countertops, courtesy of his organizational skills.

IN 2018, Daniel moved on from Beth Medrash Govoha together with Aryeh, who opened up his own catering service, Fine Art Catering and focused on simchahs and other events. Then when someone invited him to run a Lakewood restaurant. Daniel tried that out, but he couldn’t sink his teeth into it. Yes, he says, the menu was more varied, but volume was way down.

“I was used to grilling 2,000 hot dogs and here I was grilling two a day!” he says.

And there was something else he was missing in the restaurant — feeding paying customers wasn’t as satisfying as servicing hundreds of bochurim after seder.

“I missed servicing yeshivahleit,” he says.

His marriage to Miriam Rimson of Baltimore in 2019 opened new doors. Ner Yisroel was seeking an addition to its kitchen staff. Bill Goldberg, the yeshivah’s legendary food and beverage director, had been with the yeshivah since 1985, and with the opening of its new kitchen facility, the yeshivah was looking to expand its team to include the position of head chef.

After over a decade in the industry and learning from a spread of mentors, cataloguing every lesson and tip on the way, the ultimate protégé was ready to go on his own. The new $6.5 million kitchen facility is a major plus for him, and he’s grateful it was thoughtfully designed by a chef, pointing out the little add-ons that streamline the process. “A chef’s kitchen will focus on flow and operations,” he says. “There are strategically placed floor drains, hoses, and faucets where they’re needed most. Our prep area is near the service area, and not far from the pot room, because you don’t want to walk down to get the utensils.”

He opens the commercial walk-in fridge to allow in a staffer pushing trays of capons, and rolls out the cornflake chicken for tonight’s supper, where his team will ready it in time for the bochurim. Daniel glances at the raw supper and smiles.

“Bochurim like two things” he says. “Some sauce and cheese combination for lunch, and a schnitzel variety for supper. Avoid fish at all costs! And remember, they’re teenagers, so their tastes change. One week, I’ll get compliments on my cholent, and the next week the same exact recipe will barely elicit a reaction.”

He’s five years in, yet still relishes the opportunity to serve Baltimore’s bochurim. He’ll occasionally cook up something different for the boys and enjoy watching as they demolish a creative culinary creation.

“Ner has a serious Iranian population, and so on Shavuos, I provided a full-blown Sephardi menu,” the Syrian Levy says. “The boys loved it! They’re spicy kids, and they drank it up.”

The ultimate compliment came the following Rosh Hashanah, when the bochurim asked him to reprise the Sephardi cuisine.

It’s nice when the bochurim compliment his meals, but the ultimate mark of success is when the parents call him after a zeman. They’re calling to thank him, which is appreciated, says Daniel, but also to request his help. Their bochurim are home for bein hazmanim, and meal time is a struggle — does Daniel mind sharing a recipe?

550

students served on Shabbos

775
students served on weekday

Most popular Pizza & hot poppers

Least popular Baked potatoes & broccoli chicken legs

85 pans
of poppers per meal

105 sheet pans
of pizza weekly

By the Month

14,400

eggs

420

gallons of oil

Approx.

6,000 Lbs.of poultry

Approx.

1,500 lbs. of beef

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1008)