At last year’s grand opening for Oro Nami, a kosher sushi spot in Washington, the restaurant’s splashy aesthetic — red velvet booths, multicolor clocks projected on the ceiling, dark walls, a light-up floor — did not exactly align with the clientele: Capitol Hill staffers, new Trump administration appointees, K Street lobbyists and a handful of Orthodox rabbis.

But even if Oro Nami’s atmosphere felt slightly out of place in Washington’s quiet West End neighborhood, where the city’s small Orthodox community is centered, that incongruity was no match for the excitement among observant Jews living in the nation’s capital. For years, people had been clamoring for more kosher dining options in the city, and in particular one that would be open past 8 p.m. Oro Nami seemed like the answer. 

That is, until it shut down in May, after less than a year in business. 

Now Char Bar, the meat restaurant in the West End that has been serving observant Democratic and Republican officials — and their friends and colleagues — for years, is once again the only sit-down kosher restaurant with a liquor menu. Nearly all of the area’s kosher restaurants are located in Maryland suburbs like Silver Spring and Rockville, where the bulk of the region’s Orthodox community lives. In a city that thrives on power lunches, kosher-keeping Jews have only one option. 

The closure of yet another kosher restaurant in the District has reignited one of Jewish Washingtonians’ favorite conversation topics: Why aren’t there more kosher restaurants in a city as important as the nation’s capital?

People with knowledge of the restaurant business say that the answer is straightforward, if unsatisfying: economics. The Washington metro area has more than 300,000 Jews, according to a community-wide study completed in 2017. Just 5% of them are Orthodox, and most of the Orthodox Jews live in Maryland.

“Kashrut in general in D.C. I think is tricky, because from a real estate perspective, everything is priced like a normal restaurant,” said Rabbi Charlie Schwartz, the director of Lehrhaus, a kosher restaurant in Boston that plans to expand to Washington. “It’s assuming that you’ll do a high volume of business on Fridays and Saturdays, and for larger restaurant spaces that you’ll have pretty high alcohol sales, and kosher restaurants just don’t operate that way.”

“There isn’t a concentrated district [in D.C.] where all the Orthodox Jews work. There isn’t a district where everybody is going to particular museums. Even the museums and the things that tourists do are spread out,” said Dani Klein, who runs the popular blog “YeahThatsKosher.”

In 2024, Lehrhaus announced to great fanfare that it planned to open in Washington, its second city, in 2025. But the restaurant, which bills itself as a “Jewish tavern and house of learning,” has not even broken ground on a location in D.C. yet. (“We’re 100% in on D.C,” Schwartz promised. “We’re not dismayed in any way.”)

Dani Klein, who runs the popular blog “YeahThatsKosher,” said that the layout of the city doesn’t help.

“There isn’t a concentrated district [in D.C.] where all the Orthodox Jews work. There isn’t a district where everybody is going to particular museums. Even the museums and the things that tourists do are spread out,” said Klein. He compared it to Midtown Manhattan, where he works in corporate marketing. Due to its proximity to major tourist attractions such as Times Square, Broadway and Central Park, along with scores of office towers, the neighborhood has a wealth of kosher options, though he noted several restaurants have closed recently.

He described Chicago as a more apt parallel to D.C., although Washington actually has more kosher options downtown. 

“As you go further north [in Chicago], outside of downtown, and you start going to where the Jewish community lives, then you get massive pockets of kosher,” said Klein. Washington’s kosher restaurants are mostly in the suburbs, too. 

Char Bar’s owner, Michael Chelst, does not primarily earn a living from running a kosher restaurant. He also works in the mortgage business, and he recently took over operating Moti’s Market, the kosher grocery store in Rockville. 

“I call us a ‘likely for profit’ business. We’re not a nonprofit,” Chelst told Jewish Insider recently. “I get frustrated when people go, ‘Oh, why don’t you do more of this and that.’ I’m like, ‘Listen, we’re just trying to keep it open and keep it going for our community and for the people there.’” Still, the vast majority of Char Bar’s customers are tourists, according to Chelst. 

Despite the addition of Oro Nami last year, 2025 was Char Bar’s highest-revenue year since it opened in 2014. (Chelst previously ran a different kosher spot, Eli’s, in the same location.) Chelst said he thinks Washington would benefit from a dairy restaurant, even if it competes with Char Bar.

“I’m sure that would hurt our business, but I wouldn’t be upset if one opened, because that would be good for the community,” said Chelst. 

People know there’s an appetite for more options, even if the money isn’t quite there to support them. 

“I get a call, I’d say, every other month or so from someone who’s very interested in starting up any of a range of Kosher cuisine enterprises here,” said Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad). “I know of a few currently still considering doing so. They’re watching downtown business lunch traffic, and when that picks up, I think you’ll see another one or two actually get established.”

Other options have opened and closed over the years. Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist who went to prison on corruption charges, ran a kosher deli for a period in the early 2000s. An upscale kosher French restaurant called L’Etoile closed in 2002 after three years. The local Israeli chain Shouk closed last year, in part due to boycotts by anti-Israel activists. In earlier eras, when the local Jewish community was actually centered in the District and not the suburbs, kosher options were not so hard to come by; following the Civil War, six kosher restaurants were operating in D.C.

“I urge the relatively new kosher-keeping residents of Washington, D.C., to understand the privilege that they have to live in this time,” said Aaron Keyak, a Democratic consultant who moved to Washington nearly 20 years ago. “And with the advent of all these food delivery apps, you can reach into the suburbs and get everything from kosher Chinese to pizza.”

But despite the kvetching from locals, Washington’s kosher restaurant scene has not actually been stagnant in recent years. Oh Mama Grill, a casual Israeli-style falafel and shawarma restaurant, opened in Adams Morgan in 2022 and is still operating. During the academic year, anyone — whether affiliated with George Washington University or not — can visit Zingers, a kosher restaurant in the GW Hillel that opened in 2023 and is operated by the university’s dining operation, as part of the school’s pledge to provide kosher options for Jewish students. Zingers serves sandwiches and bowls alongside what it deems “the best chicken sandwich in Foggy Bottom.” At $12, the sandwich can compete with non-kosher options. 

“People eat there because the food is good,” said GW Hillel’s executive director, Daniel Novick. “A lot of non-Jewish students are eating there.”

There are even now kosher deli sandwiches available for purchase in the cafeteria at Longworth, one of the congressional office buildings. 

Other kosher options in the city include Pow Pow, a vegan Asian restaurant with two locations in the city, and Baked By Yael, a bakery across from the zoo in Woodley Park that sells pastries, challah, bagels and cake pops. They are certified by a kashrut agency operated by local Modern Orthodox rabbis — so while some strictly religious Jews may not eat there, the creation of DC Kosher to give the seal of approval to local plant-based restaurants was a boon to most of the city’s observant Jews.

“I urge the relatively new kosher-keeping residents of Washington, D.C., to understand the privilege that they have to live in this time,” said Aaron Keyak, a Democratic consultant who moved to Washington nearly 20 years ago. “And with the advent of all these food delivery apps, you can reach into the suburbs and get everything from kosher Chinese to pizza.”

“People are always kvetching about why there aren’t more establishments,” said Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad). “But once they open, the proprietors feel that the community doesn’t show enough support.” 

D.C. is a foodie city, at least for the non-kosher keepers. Two Washington restaurants appeared on The New York Times’ vaunted “50 Best Restaurants” list last year. Don’t expect to find kosher restaurants on the list — but that doesn’t mean the city’s kosher food scene is a lost cause.

Shemtov, one of the best-known Orthodox rabbis in Washington, had a blunt message to Jewish Washingtonians about the local food scene.

“People are always kvetching about why there aren’t more establishments,” said Shemtov. “But once they open, the proprietors feel that the community doesn’t show enough support.” 

It was like the now-famous Barack Obama line from the 2016 Democratic National Convention, when he urged Democrats to vote in that year’s elections. Don’t boo. Vote.

Shemtov’s message is similar. Don’t kvetch. Eat. 

When freelance writer Rachel Levin told her parents that she was going hunting for a magazine piece, they were surprised their Jewish daughter would take on what seemed like such a uniquely un-Jewish assignment. “My mom was nervous,” Levin said in a phone interview from her home in San Francisco. 

So was Levin. “The only time I shot anything resembling a gun was in rifle class at Jewish summer camp,” she recalled to Jewish Insider. 

Jews and hunting have always had something of a vexed relationship. The Jewish tradition does not generally look kindly on hunting, one reason being that kosher meat has to be slaughtered and not shot. The Jewish sage Kinky Friedman has “long believed that the most non-Jewish avocation an individual can pursue in this life is hunting,” he mused in a 2018 Tablet essay. “Why is this?” Friedman wondered. “Well, for one thing, after 40 years in the desert Jews feel uncomfortable in the great out-of-doors. For another, Jews have always been the people of the book, while guns have always been a John Wayne kind of thing.”

Levin agrees. “Maybe I know one Jewish guy who hunted once,” she said. “There’s certain things Jews don’t do, stereotypically, and this one, I think, just proves true.”

So, Levin was breaking the mold when, not too long ago, she embarked on a reporting trip for Outside magazine to hunt mule deer in the desert of central Arizona. 

Not that she was doing the shooting. Levin accompanied a pair of rugged, crossbow-toting female hunters — Rihana Cary and Amanda Caldwell — who have carved out niches in a growing social media subculture. In her feature, published last week, Levin calls them “huntstagrammers, social-media influencers who are quite literally changing the face of hunting.”

Levin has never had such aspirations, but she did admit to a lingering interest in hunting that she imagines would not have been satisfied, at least in part, without the assignment. 

“I had always kind of had this curiosity about hunting and never had gone,” said Levin, who added that she was once invited to go squirrel hunting in Mendocino by a “rare San Francisco hunter” she wrote about a while ago. “I was intrigued, but that never came together.”

Still, Levin looked at the prospect of a five-day hunting trip with some concern. “I was intimidated by the idea of hunting,” she said, “the idea of just sort of wandering the desert, which I guess, to a Jewish person, should seem familiar and comfortable.” 

“I was, of course, neurotic and worried that a mountain lion would eat us or something like that,” said Levin, the author of a book of tips on surviving animal encounters, which came about in large part due to a chance run-in with a moose in Colorado. “I was worried about having to help dismember an animal.”

Trepidation notwithstanding, Levin noticed that she was, initially, underwhelmed by the experience once she got in the field. “It was a whole different way of looking at wildlife and looking at the deer, so I found that, at first, sedentary and boring,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, are we just going to sit here?’ But then, I got into it and found it, ultimately, incredibly exhilarating in a weird way that I hadn’t expected.”

“I liked the uncertainty,” said Levin, whose subjects failed to bag a deer in the end but came close more than once. “I did want to know what that would feel like and that was one of my reasons for wanting to do it,” Levin told JI. “What does it feel like to kill your own supper and harvest your own meat?” 

Such questions hint at the possibility that Jews and hunting are more compatible than it may seem. “Jews don’t hunt,” Levin ventured, “but the overlap is just the attention and focus around meat and sort of looking ethically at how you’re eating meat, at how you’re killing your meat.”

“I’m not kosher at all, and don’t necessarily even understand it,” Levin continued. “But I can see the odd kind of overlap, in the same way that vegetarianism and hunting seem to have an overlap, a little bit, because you’re sort of wanting to know where your meat comes from.”

Levin has been a freelance writer for about a decade and before that was a travel editor at Sunset magazine. Until recently, she worked as the San Francisco restaurant critic for Eater. 

Along with Look Big, her book on animal encounters, Levin co-authored Eat Something: A Wise Sons Cookbook for Jews Who Like Food and Food Lovers Who Like Jews, released in March. She recently completed another book, to be published next spring, on the therapeutic aspects of cooking. 

Levin didn’t characterize her hunting experience as therapeutic. But she did express a desire to do it armed rather than observing others in action. 

“I feel kind of incomplete and would like to try it again,” she said. “Whether I myself might become a hunter?” she added. “That seems still kind of a big leap to make.”

Thousands of kosher industry professionals will pack the the Meadowlands Exposition Center in Secaucus, New Jersey, next week to check out the latest trends in the Jewish food world. And a day earlier, more than 100 bloggers, brands and burgeoning foodies will convene for the 7th annual Jewish Food Media Conference.  

The conference is the brainchild of Melinda Strauss, a food blogger, health coach and mom of two who lives in Long Island. She held the first such gathering in Manhattan in 2012, for around 50 kosher food bloggers. Next week she’s expecting more than 120 Jewish food media moguls from up and down the East Coast — as well as California, London and Israel — to show up in Passaic, New Jersey for this year’s event. 

Strauss told Jewish Insider that she started the conference — and knew it would keep going year after year — because “our community needs it. We thrive on seeing each other and building each other up.”

“It really is about knowing that you will leave that room with new friends,” she said. “Every year, people tell me that they have created new friendships because they get to finally see their friends in person… people that they talk to on social media all the time.”

This year’s lineup includes cookbook author Adeena Sussman; chef, recipe developer and meal prep instructor Dini Klein; food photographer Sina Mizrahi and Fleishigs Magazine publishers Shlomo and Shifra Klein. 

“The learning is really, really important because anytime someone’s growing a business, there’s always something new to learn,” said Strauss of the lectures and speeches planned for next week. But, she added, there’s also “a really important networking opportunity” at the conference, especially with its sponsors. 

Attendees photograph a workshop at a past Jewish Food Media Conference.

Each year, the conference is timed to fall just before the Kosherfest trade show, to allow those traveling from out of town to attend both. Now in its 31st year, the Kosherfest exhibit hall will be packed with manufacturers, distributors, suppliers and kosher certifiers. New buzzworthy products this year include organic oat milk, vegan bagels, a coconut-based margarine replacement, and Hebrew letter stamps for cake and cookie decoration. 

And while the major kosher brands have a prominent presence each year — including Manischewitz, Kedem (rebranded as Kayco) and Meal Mart — Menachem Lubinsky, co-founder of the trade show, says it continues to be a dynamic experience. This year, Lubinsky said, there will be 90 new exhibitors, which will make up almost 40% of the show floor.    

Strauss has been attending Kosherfest for years, and sees many changes over the years, in part due to the growth of social media. “It is so much easier to connect than it used to be,” she said. “There are people who aren’t interested or don’t feel like they need [Kosherfest] because they can just as easily connect with whoever they want to through Instagram.” But she still thinks there is a lot of value in “that face-to-face [meeting] and the connections you can make.” 

The Jewish Food Media Conference was originally named the Kosher Food Blogger’s Conference when it launched back in 2012. But several years ago, Strauss rebranded the gathering to make it more inclusive.

“I got a lot of questions from people in the first few years: ‘Is it okay if I come if I don’t keep kosher? Is it okay if I come and I don’t have a website? If I’m not a blogger?’” Strauss recalled. Today, she said, “it’s so much bigger than bloggers,” attracting online influencers, writers of all stripes, brand owners and Jewish media professionals. Plus, she added, “there is no reason for it to ever be about ‘Do you keep kosher?’” 

Strauss said this year will not focus specifically on social media, but she acknowledges the outsized role platforms like Instagram have played in Jewish food media — and in her own journey. Each morning, she greets her 24,000 Instagram followers via video while walking her dog — sharing a few thoughts and a little inspiration to start the day. 

“It’s changed everything for me,” Strauss said of the social media platform. “It’s really taken me from food blogging into motivational speaking and really — it’s changed the direction of my mindset.”

Strauss started her food blog, Kitchen Tested, soon after the birth of her second child, back in 2011. She quickly fell in love with the medium, and attracted attention for recipes like zucchini ravioli, pomegranate brisket tacos and rainbow hamantaschen. 

While the kosher food blogging world can seem saturated, Strauss said there is always space for more. “The world can’t get enough new recipes,” she said. “The world can’t get enough incredible photographers. There’s just so much room.”

And while she touts the warm and interconnected nature of the kosher foodie community, Strauss acknowledges that there have been occasional feuds, squabbles and accusations within the niche group, particularly when it comes to taking credit for new ideas. 

“It’s not always pretty,” she said. “I’ve been a part of it. I’ve witnessed it.” Over the years, she said, she’s learned to handle it better, and brush things off rather than magnifying the drama. “If somebody else is copying you, then they’re going to copy you. If you really have a problem with it, then the best thing to do is to approach them privately. Because when things get public, nobody wins.”

Strauss, a Seattle native, is energetic, bubbly and laser-focused, despite being involved in a whole host of ongoing projects. The busy blogger is spending the weekend before the Jewish Food Media Conference at a health coach convention in Arizona, and she’s already planning a brand new conference for next month titled Kavana, touted as an event for Jewish women’s personal growth. 

“I just wanted it to happen so badly,” Strauss says of the close timing between the two conferences. “I didn’t want to announce it and then wait six months for it to happen. I’d rather it be imperfect and happen than wait for it to be perfect, because perfect never comes.” 

She said the one-day event, billed as helping women “become inspired, find community, live with purpose, and learn to dream,” is for females across all religious levels and all lifestyles. “For so many women out there, it’s about your sister, it’s about your mom, it’s about your kids, it’s about your husband — it’s like everybody else is taken care of but you,” she said. “I think we just deserve so much more for ourselves. And this conference is really all about that. It’s about giving yourself time for yourself, and figuring out how to make that happen.”