Of the hundreds of dairy restaurants that dotted New York City’s streets in the twentieth century, many believe there is only one left: B&H Kosher Dairy, on Second Avenue in the East Village, founded in 1938.
Kosher dairies—pescatarian restaurants which follow Jewish religious laws regarding food—were once ubiquitous in certain neighborhoods. It’s hard to trace the histories of the ones that shuttered. I tried. First, I turned to the archive, namely the holdings of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, where I work. I sorted through our large, unarranged collection of menus and advertisements, looking for ephemeral traces of these establishments. I went through newspapers and books, mainly finding advertisements but not much on the daily experiences of the wait staff, cooks, and diners.
What I could do is pay a visit to the only living site of this history. On a sunny autumn day, en route to an off-Broadway show, I stopped by B&H Kosher Dairy Vegetarian Restaurant, a small and narrow place. The restaurant is brightly lit, and the walls are adorned with celebratory news clippings, merchandise, and menus printed on colorful construction paper. The griddle and vats of soups are behind the counter, so there’s constant activity in view.
I ordered a platter called the Tieso, after the inventive customer who created it: a generous latke, two fried pierogi, stuffed cabbage, and a bowl of matzah ball soup. (Should you ever wish to retrace my steps, note that this is a lot of food.) These dishes hold fond memories for me; it wasn’t what I ate day-to-day growing up, but dishes like latkes and matzah ball soup were common fare at holiday tables. Even though I can, and certainly do, go to B&H whenever I want, the food feels festive.
B&H is in the East Village neighborhood, once the heart of the world of American Yiddish theater. (Stopping by on my way to Kinky Boots put me in good theater-going company.) Today, you have to know where to look catch a glimpse of this illustrious history. If you keep your eyes peeled for a plaque, you’ll see that Village East movie theater on Second Avenue at East Twelfth Street is housed in the historic Louis N. Jaffee Art Theatre.
The restaurant’s owners are committed to preserving this history. According to Fawzy Abdelwahed, B&H co-owner with wife Ola, “I bought B&H twenty years ago to preserve and honor not only the restaurant’s menu as one of the last kosher lunch counters in New York City but also its history and, most importantly, our customers, many of whom have been regulars for generations. Since B&H opened in 1938, every customer is considered family. B&H is home, regardless of where you are from.” He quoted Florence Bergson Goldberg, whose father, Abie Bergson, founded B&H: “B&H was—and still is—more than a place to eat. It is a happy place where friends get together to trade stories about their workday and their families.”
Although neither Abdelwahed nor his wife are Jewish, they are committed to the tradition that B&H represents. As Richard Exelbert, a B&H regular, put it, “I think the key element that makes B&H so special goes way past the fact that it is one of the remaining Jewish dairies, itself a miracle in 2023. What makes B&H so wonderful are its proprietors—Fawzy and Ola—and everyone who works for them. Neither of them are Jewish (they are from Egypt and Poland), and yet they are literally feeding us our culture and making every effort to keep it going.”
It hasn’t always been the case that B&H was the last vestige of a neighborhood once bustling with Jewish life and culture. Kosher dairies, cheap eateries that catered to Jews, were plentiful in New York City in the twentieth century. They were called dairy restaurants or milkhiks, as opposed to fleyshiks, which serve meat. Dairy restaurants were concentrated in heavily Jewish neighborhoods, especially the Lower East Side and the East Village, along with the Upper West Side and parts of Brooklyn. In kashrut, or kosher law, mixing milk and meat is forbidden; Jewish restaurants that serve meat will often have no dairy products, and vice versa. The lack of meat differentiated kosher dairies from other Jewish eateries like delis.
Even beyond the fact that the food would be kosher, the category often signified that the restaurant served Jewish cuisine. Longstanding Jewish communities exist all over the world, so “Jewish cuisine” is near-impossible to define. However, there are many dishes strongly associated with European Jewry that were served at a typical dairy, like blintzes, borscht, latkes, lox, soup, herring, and more.
A number of factors, not all particularly Jewish, influenced the rise of the kosher dairy: kashrut, Jewish involvement in vegetarian movements, an increasing prevalence of restaurants overall, the advent of commercial refrigeration, and the very practical issue that working-class Jews needed somewhere to eat during the day. Jews took advantage of dairy-centered food as a cheaper alternative to meat. See this Pet Milk-sponsored recipe booklet from 1950, touting “money-saving new versions of delicious traditional dishes.” (These recipes are among many shared on Eva Miller’s show on the Yiddish radio station WEVD.)
Kosher dairies were intimately integrated into the lives of New York City’s Jews, popular during a time when a critical mass of them were working-class, living in tenements, and heavily represented in exploitative industries like the garment trade.
As MacArthur Fellow Ben Katchor notes in The Dairy Restaurant, the most comprehensive history of the phenomenon available, dairy restaurants were important sites of culture, serving as meeting places for artists, writers, and political organizers. They functioned as “third spaces”: spots that weren’t home or work, but where people could gather and linger without being obligated to spend a lot of money. A modern-day equivalent might be a coffeeshop or a community center. Dairies were also a place of comfort for first-generation immigrants. Here were everyday restaurants where they could eat familiar foods and be around familiar people.
Public historian Gavin Beinart-Smollan worked as a researcher for an online course about Jewish food at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, A Seat at the Table: A Journey into Jewish Food. “While doing archival research, I came across a menu for an establishment called the ‘Orthodox Kosher dairy Restaurant’ located at 171 East Broadway,” he says. “I love this menu because it sums up the ethos of the Jewish dairy restaurant for me. This restaurant was so unobtrusive that apparently it didn't even have a real name. Contemporary Jewish food has become so laden with identity formation and meaning-making that it’s nice to read a menu like this and be reminded that this food was simply what people ate when they wanted to feel at home.”
For many American Jews, myself included, this kind of cuisine gradually became “special occasion food.” At dairies, children could feel connected to their parents’, grandparents’, or even great-grandparents’ homelands.
A perusal of the nearly 200 comments on this New York Times article about Ben Katchor’s book reveals a couple of key themes. One is that dairies evoke a strong sense of place. Marc Goldfeder in Tucson, Arizona, commented, “B&H is just down the street from Gem Spa at the corner of 2nd and St. Marks Place (8th St.) Gem Spa used to be Goldfeder’s (home of Goldfeder’s famous egg-cream) from the ‘20s until the late ‘50’s … It’s nice to see that some of the old places are still there in what, at the time, was never called ‘the East Village.’” Other comments cite B&H’s proximity to landmarks like the Cooper Union, the Fillmore East, and the Village Voice building. B&H is intimately wrapped up in the history of its neighborhood beyond the specific Jewish history.
Suzanne Lipkin, spouse of Richard Exelbert and fellow B&H regular, feels the same way. She recalls, “My college roommate who kept kosher introduced me to B&H when we were freshmen on a post-finals spree in the East Village. I had never been to a kosher restaurant like it, much less a vegetarian diner. To me, it is the quintessential New York: people of all different backgrounds coming together to be fed with love.”
Another theme of the comments is recollections of curt staff members. It was part of the experience! One NYC-based David Goldberg commented, “A toast (challah toast) to Dave the counterman at B&H in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Every plate served with a side of gall. If someone left a dollar tip, Dave or another counterman would cry out, ‘Jumbo Jockey!’ I miss the vegetarian chopped liver sandwich most of all.”
As Exelbert put it, “It’s funny because for a lot of people—the first time they go—if they sit at one of the tables, they are often taken aback when the food isn’t brought to them but instead unceremoniously slapped down on the bar counter with no explanation … Without having any idea that it was carrying on a tradition, I sensed how special this restaurant was.”
Short employees are part of the lore surrounding B&H and, indeed, kosher dairies in general. People recall them fondly as part of the experience of going to dairies beyond the food.
From the Stacks
Relatively little documentation on kosher dairies survives. As Katchor told me via email, “dairy restaurants (within any culture) were rarely covered in popular press except when they intersected with other histories—politics, crimes, religion, et cetera. A researcher is obliged to look in out-of-the-way places for these oblique references.” However, even limited material is informative. What appears below does not constitute an exhaustive bibliography but a selection of artifacts that illustrate some element of the broader history of dairy restaurants.
Restaurant reviews show that even if dairies were well-received by non-Jews, they could not easily escape being marked as serving ethnic or “outsider” fare. A positive review of Hammer’s Dairy Restaurant in a 1959 issue of local newspaper The Villager noted, “All of these foods make for a refreshing change of pace for the ordinary Yankee ‘meat and potatoes’ diet. They must be sampled to be appreciated as they are singular in preparation and taste.” Forget about the actual dishes. The mere fact that Jewish restaurants had an entire meatless meal category was unusual and noteworthy.
A major element of the appeal of dairy restaurants was their perceived cleanliness. This undated advertisement card from a restaurant called Eichler’s (“dairy” is specified in the Yiddish but not the English) highlights the draws of its new venue: it was larger—and airy. With their bright, industrial lighting and tiled floors, dairies were seen as clean and modern. Eichler’s was but one dairy that Jews viewed as a refined option in which to dine out.
Dairies were also sites where one could observe Jewish cultural traditions interacting with American cultural traditions—or, more accurately, the cultural traditions of other ethnic groups in the United States. For instance, a 1970 menu from the legendary Ratner’s shows that it served the popular “International Specialties” of that time period, including chop suey and eggplant parmigiana.
The Queens restaurant Benjy’s Dairy Restaurant & Sushi Bar is another example. This menu is undated but looks to be from sometime in the 2000s. As tastes changed, the basic premise of a kosher restaurant serving dairy-focused dishes and fish dishes remained, but the components shifted from blintzes and herring to pizza and sushi.
In a similar vein, see this 1949 advertisement in the Yiddish newspaper Der Tog, where the name and address of Kalb’s Kosher Dairy are written in English, with “West Side” transliterated in Yiddish above.
Kosher dairies, like any other business geared to Jewish people in New York City in 1949, sat at a nexus of primarily Yiddish-oriented Jewish culture and English-language assimilation. Over time, outside culinary influences impacted the dishes served. Because dairies functioned as third spaces, though, they did not necessarily have to serve explicitly “Jewish” food to be Jewish establishments. Their patronage was Jewish, especially because the restaurants were kosher, and that is what mattered.
Ephemeral documentation is key to understanding the importance of the kosher dairy. The food traditionally served in kosher dairies is food that was once everyday Jewish food, cooked in the home. Today, that element of Jewish life has diminished for many, even if they consume traditional Jewish dishes on Shabbat, at holidays, or on outings to Jewish restaurants. Also, restaurants themselves are intangible—or at least transient—heritage markers, and New York’s dairy restaurants have been, by and large, shuttered. This is evident in the sometimes-fervent interest in historical preservation surrounding B&H. Even when cultural traditions like home and restaurant cooking inevitably shift with time, archival material can give insight into what they represented.
Kosher Dairies Today
Today, few places bill themselves as kosher dairies, although a handful resemble them. There are complex reasons for this decline, including Jewish migration to the suburbs and the rise of the chain restaurant.
That said, dairies live on in spirit. New York City restaurant and catering company Mr. Broadway has undergone many evolutions since its establishment in 1922, but it began as R. Gross Dairy Kosher. Russ & Daughters, a New York City institution still standing, perhaps no longer serves a largely working-class Jewish clientele, but the menu sure looks dairy-based.
What you’re more likely to find today is something like Jerusalem Pizza in Highland Park, New Jersey, which—until a devastating fire in early 2024—offered kosher pizza and sushi. Jerusalem Pizza didn’t call itself a kosher dairy, but in many ways it served the same purpose. You went there to get relatively cheap and easy kosher food, with confidence that you wouldn’t have trouble if you’re a vegetarian. The model lives on in Jewish areas, both in cities and in the suburban neighborhoods to which Jews migrated. It’s just that the offerings shifted to mainstream “American food,” not dishes one might associate with the shtetl.
In this way, Jerusalem Pizza is just like Benjy’s, the pizzeria/sushi restaurant mentioned above—which is still operating but at some point dropped “dairy restaurant” from its name. Even if traditional milkhiks have fallen out of fashion, new versions of the restaurant remain an important element of everyday life in neighborhoods with significant Jewish populations. Both in and out of New York, third spaces are still in fashion.
Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City.
