Pasta for Pessah

The kosher Spaghettis restaurant in Jerusalem’s Mamilla mall has a menu for people who want to pretend it’s not Pessah.

By GIL STERN STERN HOFFMAN
Pasta restaurant_521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Pasta restaurant_521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Not looking forward to Pessah and its restrictions on bread, pasta, pizza, etc? The kosher Spaghettis restaurant in Jerusalem’s Mamilla mall has a menu for people who want to pretend it’s not Pessah.
The Eluna.com restaurant website has a long list of kosher restaurants that are open during the holiday with and without kitniyot – legumes that most Ashkenazi Jews do not eat during Pessah, while their Sephardi counterparts do.
But no restaurant on the list is more surprising than Spaghettis, the kosher branch of the national Spaghettim chain that prides itself on its Italian menu of pastas with many sauces. The restaurant will not only be open and kosher le'mehadrin, it will have neither kitniyot nor gebrochts – matza with liquid, which many hassidic Jews do not eat during Pessah.
Other branches of the national chain that are not kosher will have a full menu of regular spaghetti. This year, the restaurant in the Mamilla mall will be using potato flour to make fettuccine with six different kinds of sauces, five kinds of pizza and two kinds of lasagne. The Pessah menu also includes gnocchi, fish and salads.
“We will be making fettuccine rather than spaghetti because a thinner pasta would come apart when we boiled it,” explains Ben Hudja, who owns the restaurant and the adjacent meat bistro Kedma on Mamilla’s third floor above The Gap.
Absent from the menu will be focaccia, salmon in soy sauce, and sweet potato chips because they are fried in flour. The restaurant did not add any items especially for the holiday because the goal was to stay as close as possible to its regular menu.
“We aren’t opening just to say we did it but to show we can continue to present what this restaurant is in essence also during Passover – an Italian-Israeli restaurant for people who love pasta,” says Hudja. “We realize that a restaurant built on spaghetti at the highest level of kosher certification being open during Passover is a bit ironic, but we decided to try it. We wanted to do it for our clientele and to test what our abilities are from a culinary perspective.”