Tag: restaurants

New start for Café Forty One

Chef Menajem Peretz (above) has partnered with Yamila Chikiar and chocolatier Daniel Presman. Peretz and the couple met through a mutual friend, and the three now co-own FortyOne Catering, Neshama and Café Forty One. (photo by Lauren Kramer)

It’s a new year and a new beginning for the restaurant at Oak and 41st. Café Forty One is under new ownership and has reopened at its former location, following the closing of Shuk Eat + Play several months ago. The three entrepreneurs at its helm are energized, excited and ready to feed Jewish Vancouver with soul food that’s kosher, delicious and caters to both the sweet-toothed and those who prefer savoury.

About 50 people showed up for the grand opening of Café Forty One last Thursday. Menajem Peretz, by now a well-known face in Vancouver’s kosher catering scene with a well-deserved reputation for culinary excellence, was in the kitchen. The trays that emerged carried crispy avocado spring rolls, bruschetta, and latke sandwiches filled with smoked salmon and sour cream.

photo - Yamila Chikiar and Daniel Presman
Yamila Chikiar and Daniel Presman (photo by Lauren Kramer)

Peretz’s co-partners, Daniel Presman and Yamila Chikiar, managed the reception, displaying their talent behind the glass display case, which featured an assortment of pastries, mini-cakes, bonbons (Presman’s exquisitely decorated chocolate squares with liquid fillings), cupcakes, strudel, muffins, cake pops and blintzes.

“In the two months before we opened, we put up new lighting, re-did the décor and renovated the tables,” said Chikiar, who moved to Vancouver from Buenos Aires 16 months ago with her spouse, Presman, mother-in-law and two children. Presman, a chocolatier who sold his bonbons to five-star hotels in Argentina, went back to work making kosher chocolates under the brand name Neshama, and the artistic, rich treats were quickly picked up by Superstore.

photo - Neshama chocolates
Neshama chocolates (photo by Lauren Kramer)

The couple met Peretz, who is also from Buenos Aires, through a mutual friend and hit it off immediately. Peretz was impressed with the bonbons and asked Presman to supply Neshama chocolates to his catering company. The relationship evolved and Group 41 was the result, a parent company that encompasses FortyOne Catering, Neshama and Café Forty One, and is owned and operated by all three partners.

“It was like a blessing when we met Menajem,” Chikiar said. “It’s difficult immigrating to another country and we had a hard year at first. But then opportunities started presenting themselves and it was like G-d was guiding us on a path.”

Café Forty One is a dairy establishment following Chalav Yisrael protocols, while FortyOne Catering offers meat, dairy and pareve meals. Chikiar is heading up marketing and communications and managing the front of house for the restaurant, while Presman heads up the sweet department and Peretz masterminds the savoury.

“The idea is to offer big portions and to give Café Forty One diners something extra,” Presman explained. “For example, all our sandwiches come with a shot of the hot soup of the day and, with any hot drink, we’re giving diners two free bonbons.”

The menu includes soups, salads, falafel and hummus plates, shakshuka, blintzes, omelettes, pizzas and sandwiches, as well as a wide assortment of sweet treats. The restaurant is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday through Friday and underground parking is free for diners.

Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net.

New hummus in town

Jay Eidelman, left, and Adi Kabazo serve up plates of hummus at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival earlier this month. (photo by Lior Noyman Productions)

It was Camp Miriam that brought Vancouverites Jay Eidelman and Adi Kabazo together, but it was hummus that ignited their competitive spirit and, ultimately, their new business together, Hummus Express.

Kabazo is an Israeli business and marketing consultant who came to the city 14 years ago and really misses the whole experience of hummus in Israel. “As any Israeli who moved here can tell you, we know what the good stuff looks and tastes like when it comes to hummus, and we crave the experience of sitting in an often-loud place, enjoying a plate of hummus with some warm topping as a meal,” he said. “It’s a truly fulfilling experience in many ways, and we miss that.”

Eidelman is a Montreal-born writer and editor who teaches in the University of British Columbia’s summer school and describes himself as a foodie. “Montreal is a big food city with great Mediterranean Jewish-Israeli cuisine,” he reflected. “I spent significant time in Israel and loved treating myself to a meal of hummus on Friday mornings when I was studying at Hebrew University. It’s a fond memory and one I wanted to recreate.”

The two started discussing the best hummus in Israel while on a work weekend at Camp Miriam, and then started making and comparing their respective hummus recipes. “As we were doing this, we thought, maybe it could be a business,” said Eidelman. “For me, this was a passion and a dream that I want to see fulfilled.”

In August, the pair took a trip to San Francisco to check out its hummus scene and returned inspired. They invested in some equipment and, just before Rosh Hashanah, started making hummus in the kitchens at Congregation Beth Israel and at Temple Sholom. Today, they offer hummus and a few vegan salads, pickles, sauces and breads on order, and sell their products at various community events and festivals. Knowing how many restaurants open and fail, they’re moving slowly with their small business.

Of course, there’s hummus already in Vancouver – anyone who frequents a grocery store will tell you that. “But ours has no preservatives and is not meant to have a shelf life of weeks or months,” said Kabazo. “It’s smoother, creamier and has a different quality and flavor.”

The pair uses chickpeas, tahini, garlic, lemon juice and salt in their recipe, importing their tahini and taking care not to add any extra fat or chemicals.

“Ours is a very natural hummus and we like it served as a meal, with a warm topping like Adi’s shakshuka or my eggplant salad,” Eidelman said.

Their toppings are exclusively vegan and vegetarian and there are no plans to create any meat toppings in the future.

Kabazo and Eidelman hope to have some pop-up locations by renting a restaurant for a day and offering an Israeli, hummus-centric breakfast. But, for the time being, they’re making hummus once a week and scheduling tableside sales of food-to-go at events including the Eastside Culture Crawl, which runs to Nov. 20, and the Chanukah party at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver Dec. 4.

They’re immensely grateful to Beth Israel and Temple Sholom for providing them with access to their kitchen facilities and giving them community exposure through various events.

“We’re doing events like last weekend’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival [Nov. 6], where we fed 200 hungry movie-goers with hummus prior to the screening of Hummus! The Movie, and we’re relying heavily on social media to spread the word,” Eidelman said.

Deep down, Eidelman knows he and Kabazo are offering a much-needed product that carries a combination of memory, tradition, taste and skill.

“If Vancouver wants to be a world-class city, there’s an element missing, and that’s world-class hummus,” he said.

For orders, visit hummusexpress.ca or email [email protected].

Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net.

Connecting local food fans

With the Tangoo app, Paul Davidescu, centre, brings together restaurateurs, social influencers and diners. (photo from tangoo.ca)

Food is more than nourishment, says Paul Davidescu, it builds community. The Vancouver entrepreneur is behind an app that aims to unite people over food.

“We are passionate about creating community,” said Davidescu, whose company, Tangoo, is connecting local food fans. “The way that we believe you create community is over the dinner table, where you get people together for dinner, brunch, what we call breaking bread, because that’s when the big ideas get created, that’s when people find love, that’s when people really get together.”

For restaurateurs, Tangoo promises to “attract the perfect customer by sharing your business story through social media influencers, our pocket concierge app, and integrated marketing solutions.” For diners, Tangoo offers “the pulse of the city’s best dining experiences, exclusively recommended by foodie influencers featured on the app.” And, for social influencers – a relatively new but increasingly powerful demographic – Tangoo offers a front row seat to emerging food trends in the city.

Davidescu, who graduated from the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business in 2012, explained that businesses are having an increasingly difficult time connecting with young consumers through traditional media.

“Nowadays, PR [and] social media are turning into one, especially if you’re looking at targeting millennials,” he said. “They don’t really watch TV anymore. They’re on social media.”

Tangoo’s approach is to provide information through their mobile app that helps potential customers get a sense of a restaurant’s personality. Part of the experience includes the opinions of local figures like chef Vikram Vij, record label founder Ari Paunonen and lifestyle expert Natalie Langston on their favorite meal destinations.

While the Tangoo app has about 20,000 users, Davidescu’s vision is to leverage the existing audiences of influencers. By inviting well-known figures and social media bigshots to be the first to experience, say, a new summer cocktail or a dining room’s revamped menu, Tangoo helps restaurants get their news out to the people who most closely follow such things.

“We started to actually connect these influencers who we already have on our app with the actual restaurants directly,” he said. “Not to the point where they’re just recommending them on our app, but they’re actually going into the restaurant and they’re tasting the food and actually posting on their own Instagram.”

Influencer marketing, as it is known, is Tangoo’s bread and butter.

“Think of it as more informal PR,” he said. For businesses with tight budgets – and restaurants tend to operate on narrow margins – conventional media can be very expensive and social media can be a time-consuming gig.

“You resort to either not doing social media or giving it to your manager at the bar who is multitasking and will never, ever do a very good job on that,” said Davidescu.

Tangoo aims to do the work for the restaurant by connecting them with social media figures with foodie followers.

“It’s kind of like getting guaranteed press through a very targeted channel,” he said. “We are trying to make PR really affordable for restaurants, that’s the core. They’re the ones that nurture community by being alive and keeping things interesting.”

Right now, Tangoo is busy with the Vancouver food scene, but Davidescu said it could grow organically to other cities in future.

“There are a lot of restaurants in Vancouver,” said Davidescu, who was born in Mexico and came here as a child. He was a camper and counselor at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, Camp Hatikvah and Camp Biluim in Quebec. When he was a student at UBC, he helped organize an interfaith discussion group. As part of his co-op studies in business school, he had placements in Germany and Barcelona.

Davidescu said there is a connection between his Jewishness and his devotion to food and connecting over a meal. Community is built across the table, he said.

“Food is cultural,” he said.

“It’s a way to just bring people together.”