Basil, a restaurant in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is a kosher joint that seeks to bridge the gap between the neighborhood’s very divided Jewish and black populations. And it sounds pretty great!
Danny Branover, Basil’s principal owner, was struck by that when in 2001 he moved from Jerusalem to Crown Heights, which he chose because he, his wife and their children — he has seven now — belong to the Lubavitch movement. He remembers thinking that its Jewish and black residents were more estranged than the Jews and Arabs in Israel, who, he notes, have profound political differences and much more reason to distrust one another. That confounded him.
“I talk to anybody,” Branover says. His father, a Russian physicist, joined the Lubavitch movement as an adult, while his mother, along with many other relatives, never embraced religion with quite the same fervor. “I like interacting with people. It was very annoying.”
Besides which, part of the distinctive philosophy and theology of the Lubavitch movement is to reach out to, educate and inspire others: only when the world is a more virtuous place, the thinking goes, will the messiah come. So why, Branover always wondered, did so many Lubavitchers in Crown Heights keep so steadfastly to themselves?
Branover started Basil to bring the diverse communities in Crown Heights together. He hired a Catholic Latina manager, who in turn hired a culturally diverse staff. There were some bumps in the road — waitresses singing “happy birthday” without realizing that Hasidic men aren’t allowed to listen to women sing — but generally things were going pretty well. Until:
Then, shortly after 8, a young man walked in with a young woman wearing a summery, skimpy dress — sleeveless and backless, so that you could detect some sort of elaborate tattoo between her shoulder blades — and they took two of the empty stools at the bar, leaning in close to each other to talk. About five minutes later, another young couple took two more stools; the woman, in a black tank top and gray denim miniskirt, was angled so that her knees almost touched the man’s. And there the four new arrivals sat, emblems of the way the neighborhood was changing, on prominent display. They drew several stares, though they didn’t seem conscious of that.
They were gone by 9, shortly after which the man in black appeared. Perez instantly recognized him as Rabbi Don Yoel Levy, a Hasid who heads OK Kosher Certification, which monitors and validates Basil’s advertised adherence to kosher dietary rules. He and his deputies are supposed to make unannounced kitchen inspections. But when Perez filled me in on the exchanges that she and other staff members at Basil had with him — I was in the restaurant then, as I had been all night long — she said that he expressed concern not about the food but about inappropriate attire and immoral behavior at the bar. Someone had apparently called to complain. Perez said that the rabbi was also requesting access, from this point forward, to Basil’s internal surveillance cameras.
Uh oh.
That’s unfortunately not the first time that a little bit of female leg has caused an uproar at the restaurant:
Early one evening in June, about a dozen conservative yeshiva students staged a protest of sorts in front of the restaurant. Perez says that they yelled at her for not having her ankles covered, called one of the black waitresses a “slut” and demanded that Basil be shut down. She told them that she was calling the cops — which she did — and the group dispersed.
It was an exceptional incident, but a reminder of how careful she needed to be. She makes sure that waitresses change into long sleeves and long skirts for the duration of their shifts and that waiters know not to touch female customers. She engineers an end to behavior by customers that would go unchallenged and maybe even unnoticed in restaurants outside Crown Heights. One night, she recalls, a young woman repeatedly kissed and nibbled on a male companion’s neck. When Perez asked her to stop, she responded by defiantly planting a kiss on the lips of another young woman in the group. Perez says she then forcefully escorted her to the back of the dining room, pointed to a picture of the Lubavitch spiritual leader that hangs there and admonished her: “You’re in their backyard. You have to respect their ways.”
Trying to strike an appropriate balance is tough, especially when you’re a private establishment trying to cater to a diversity of needs and beliefs. It seems like Basil is trying to draw the lines in the right places — having the waitstaff abide by certain reasonable rules, while not making every single female customer wear a floor-length dress. But apparently that’s not quite enough for the morality police:
WHEN I CALLED LEVY, he disputed a few aspects of Perez’s account. He said his primary objective that Sunday night was to see the kitchen. He hadn’t communicated any desire to regulate how customers dress, he said, nor had he been responding to any complaint. But he also said his kosher-certification agency had a contractual right and responsibility to monitor a restaurant’s entertainment — no crude comedians, no female singers — and to make sure, for example, that young men and women at Basil weren’t socializing “other than for matrimonial purposes.”
“If it became a hangout like that,” he said, referring to Basil, “not only would I take off the certification if needed, no one would go into it. They would shun it. Basil doesn’t want that.” He said that his request to see surveillance video was standard, and that similar requests have been readily met by other kosher restaurants under his watch.
A few days later, Branover received a fax from someone at Levy’s certification agency. It reiterated a demand for access to video feeds, which was necessary “due to the constant complaints from the community regarding the lingering youth in your establishment.”
Lingering youth?! The horror.
Look, Kosher certification has to mean something. I get that, and I’m not suggesting that kosher certification abandon its principles because I don’t like some of them. But really, no socializing for purposes other than matrimony? I wonder how that works with the kosher restaurants that I have gone to, in mixed company, for business lunches, which were definitely not for matrimonial purposes. It really is a shame that a restaurant with such a positive purpose is being targeted.