Sirius XM Podcasts So there's this neon sign here that says, teach your tongue to say, I don't know, which is another sort of like mantra of this place.
It's actually a line from Maimonides who I think was speaking more about, like intellectual humility than anything culinary.
But it's also sort of part of what this place is about is like try something a little bit different.
And, like whatever you thought Jewish food was, we're going to show you that it's not exactly what you were expecting.
This is The Sporkful.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman.
Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
There's an old Jewish expression, two Jews, three opinions.
It's practically built into the fabric of Judaism that everything is worth questioning, discussing and debating.
Yeah sure, the sacred texts are sacred, but that hasn't stopped rabbis, scholars and families at the dinner table from commenting on the centuries of commentary.
With the Jewish high holiday starting tonight, I wanted to visit a place that perfectly encapsulates that spirit of debate.
It's called Lehrhaus in Somerville, Massachusetts, on the outskirts of Boston.
Lehrhaus combines two concepts that, according to its founders, have never been combined before.
It's a Jewish tavern and a house of learning.
It aims to reimagine what a Jewish space can look and feel like.
Today, I'm here to check the place out, eat some food, of course, and meet the founders.
My name is Rabbi Charlie Schwartz.
Joshua Foer.
I'm definitely not a rabbi.
And you answered my next question, Josh.
Foer, not foyer.
Who knows?
Well, I think you know, probably because it's your name.
How do you say it?
You say Foer.
I say Foer like the number.
Okay.
Would you say Foer or Foer?
Honestly, I have no idea.
Foer?
Foer?
Foer?
Just say your name one more time for me.
Josh Foer.
Foer.
All right.
I got it.
But you won't necessarily get the same answer from anybody else.
Right.
See what I'm saying?
Josh can't even agree with himself about how to pronounce his name.
Two Jews, three opinions.
Josh and Charlie are both deeply Jewish, but in different ways.
First, we'll talk about Josh's upbringing.
He grew up in Washington, D.C.
I grew up in what I think of as a very classic American Jewish household where probably we didn't go to synagogue every week, but we mostly did Friday night dinner every Friday night, and then we would turn on the baseball game.
What about Jewish culture?
I mean, it was everywhere.
It permeated every aspect of my childhood.
My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor and grew up in a house where there was no question of who we were or where we belonged.
Josh's mother, Esther Safran Foer, led the cultural programming at the historic 6th and I Synagogue in DC.
And the Foers are a literary family.
One of his brothers is the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, and the other is the noted writer Franklin Foer.
Josh has also followed a literary path, first as a journalist, then as a co-founder of the website Atlas Obscura.
After that, he co-founded a site that provides free access to digitized versions of sacred Jewish texts.
It's called Safaria and it's become really popular, which Josh attributes to the Jewish approach to those texts.
It's not actually a collection of books on a shelf.
It's this living conversation across centuries, across millennia, across continents of people arguing with, reverently disagreeing with each other.
And out of that conversation, conversation around text, comes new ideas and new ways of thinking about the world.
So Josh's interest in Judaism as a religion is very much an intellectual one.
Rabbi Charlie, he grew up more observant in Portland, Oregon.
He went to Oberlin, where he studied philosophy and religion.
And he worked in the school's kosher halal co-op.
The kosher halal co-op when I was there is for both observant Jewish students, observant Muslim students, and anyone who wanted meat on a regular basis because we were known for serving meat.
So we got a lot of like rugby players and just random folks.
I was the holiday coordinator.
And so, as holiday coordinator, I had the joy of both coordinating Passover and Iftar for Ramadan, which was a lot of fun.
And those are both holidays where there are specific rules around eating.
Exactly, exactly.
What did you take from that experience in the kosher halal co-op?
I think a lot of what I learned is really the power of hospitality and the power of food and tables and welcoming people in terms of opening up conversations and connections and going deeper and enabling people to really create and cement a bond.
What made you decide to become a rabbi?
I really feel like it was a calling.
It's something that I've always wanted to do.
And I could give you intellectual reasons why.
I think the rabbinate is a powerful way to create positive change in the world.
That it's a way to reach people deeply and spiritually, which is a deep necessity right now.
But if I'm really honest with you, it's a deep calling in my soul.
And it's something that I've always been drawn to.
Charlie was never a rabbi in a synagogue.
Instead, he worked at various Jewish organizations.
He ended up in Boston, where he met Josh.
During the pandemic, they started thinking about Jewish experiences and spaces that would bring people together once the world opened up again.
I think we were both sort of contemplating what was missing in our own Jewish lives and in what feels like missing from the Jewish community at large, which is, you know, at this point in time, something like 70 of American Jews just have no association with any synagogue, with any Like they don't send their kids to Hebrew school.
It's hard to find a way in sometimes.
We wanted something that felt like... a place that we would want to hang out in.
And it's hard to walk into a synagogue.
And like, then what do you do?
And it's uncomfortable.
And like, what am I supposed to wear?
You come into a bar.
Everybody knows how to walk into a bar.
A lot of people do it at the beginning of jokes.
It's true.
Sometimes a rabbi walks into a bar.
Charlie and Josh came up with this idea of combining a restaurant and bar with a Beit Midrash.
That's the Hebrew term for a house of learning.
But they didn't want it to be your grandma's Beit Midrash.
They envisioned a place where people could hear talks on everything from sacred texts to the Jewish history of punk music.
A place where people would learn not just from books, but from each other.
They decided Lair House would be a non-profit to emphasize that learning and community part.
You sort of viewed this place as a mashup of these two different places the Jewish Tavern and the Jewish House of Learning.
What was it about that combination that you thought was sort of the secret sauce?
It's like hospitality and just like a place that feels warm and welcoming and that you want to spend time in.
And I think there's a hunger among American Jews for actual, rich, authentic food.
Jewish education.
I grew up feeling like I was maybe like short-changed in my Jewish education.
The more I engaged with it and started to ask and answer questions, the more I felt like wow, this is really interesting stuff.
Most of what we get is like the Old Testament and the Holocaust.
Yeah, there's a lot more than that.
Right, right.
I mean, there's a lot to cover.
We've been around for a minute.
It's so textured and nuanced and the debates and arguments and conversations that have been going on are so relevant and vital.
We wanted to create a space where that was all...
My favorite thing to do is to sit in that seat over there with one of these drinks in my hand with a book, watching people all kinds of people come in for classes that are on a crazy variety of eccentric and sometimes esoteric subjects, and sometimes right down the middle of the road.
And it just feels good.
There aren't a lot of places to feel good right now as a Jew.
And I think one of the things that I know you're also going for is so.
Much of what we are taught of Jewish history is about suffering and victimhood and horrible things happening to us.
And there isn't nearly as much joy and happiness and even like fun.
Yeah.
And one of the things I love about Lair House is that it's also a place where non-Jews can experience those things.
So if you wanted to explain to a non-Jewish friend or family member or colleague, like this is Judaism.
It's amazing.
There's so much stuff here.
It's so great.
Where would you take them?
Would you take them to synagogue?
Maybe.
Would you take them to a JCC?
Maybe.
Would you take them to Lair House?
Definitely.
In the U.S., we're a lot more used to seeing Irish pubs than Jewish ones, right?
But there's actually a long history of Jews running taverns.
200 years ago in Poland, Jews were prohibited from owning land and from many other professions.
But Polish nobles believed a myth that Jews don't drink, so they were happy to have Jews running the taverns they owned.
By some measures, 85% of taverns in Poland were run by Jews at that time.
So Charlie and Josh are far from the first in that respect.
Their house opened in 2023, and that year they made Esquire's list of the 50 best new restaurants in America.
It was the first kosher restaurant ever to make the list.
So let's go to the front.
Before we eat and drink, Charlie and Josh take me on a tour.
There's a restaurant and bar section with a lot of wood and exposed brick, like you might expect to see at any cool place nowadays.
There's a sort of hangout area with comfy chairs that has more coffee shop vibes.
And then there's a room with a wall full of books and a long wooden table where the talks happen.
Taken all together, it's not quite like any restaurant I've ever seen.
We have a library of about 3000 books, everything from cookbooks to graphic novels philosophy poetry, sacred texts.
And then we have what we like to call magical Jewish objects sprinkled throughout.
One of those magical objects is a wall of Jewish texts for every occasion where you pick a card based on your current life predicament, and it provides some kind of ancient advice.
Like you're tipsy and you're thinking about texting your ex or you're deciding whether to attend the funeral or it's move-in day, which just happened here a couple days ago.
We have one...
Then there's a board with the look of Fenway Park's green monster that counts down to the next Jewish holiday.
It plays off the old Jewish joke that every holiday can be summed up as they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat.
So Rosh Hashanah is actually one of the few where they didn't try and kill us.
Right, well that's good.
That's a nice change of pace.
We're still going to eat.
On the staircase down to the bathroom there's a gumball machine that dispenses individual packets of lactate.
And there's a giant black and white portrait on the wall.
So Bertha Pappenheim is sort of like the patron saint of Lair House.
Bertha Pappenheim was a Jewish-Austrian feminist and activist who's also famous for being Anna O, a patient who Freud wrote about extensively.
As I said, Lair House is kosher, which presented a problem for Josh and Charlie before they could open.
The previous restaurant in that space cooked a lot of pork.
And according to kosher law, you can't just take all the pork out of the kitchen and call it kosher.
Any surfaces that have touched pork or any non-kosher food need to be made kosher.
Does that require a special ceremony?
Do you have to, like, is there a special cleansing that has to take place, you guys?
Just have to light everything on fire.
It's just a lot of burning.
Do you have to bury the entire restaurant in the backyard to build a new one?
No, just...
It's cleaning and then there's different ways to do it.
There's burning, so like getting something very hot, or dipping it in boiling water.
So it does involve oftentimes blow torches.
Making sure the restaurant met the highest kosher standards was really important to Josh and Charlie.
They wanted any Jew to be able to eat there.
Now, generally, kosher restaurants serve either dairy or meat, but not both.
Under kosher rules, the two can't be combined.
Lair House is a dairy restaurant, but they can serve fish because fish is not considered meat according to kosher law.
So the place is basically pescatarian slash vegetarian.
Being kosher also puts one more restriction on the restaurant.
It can't be open on Fridays and Saturdays because of Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath.
That presents a business challenge for a restaurant, but they're also starting to host private Shabbat dinners that won't violate the rules of the day of rest.
As we finish up our tour, I start seeing some food come out of the kitchen, and I'm beckoned over to a table.
You should start with this before it melts.
Is that ice cream?
That is ice cream.
The guy presenting this first item is Noah Clickstein, the co-executive chef.
He came to Lair House from a restaurant called Juliet, a well-known French place just down the road.
So what drew you here?
Charlie and Josh.
The idea of a Jewish space and getting to explore what Jewish food is, separating it from food Jews eat, which I always think is really interesting.
What was your impression or understanding of Jewish food growing up?
I came from a mixed Sephardi Ashkenazi household, so I understood that it was more than just bagels and lox and calf's foot jelly, which I love.
But I didn't really understand the full breadth of everything and understand where the different cuisines around the world influenced the Jewish food and the cultures and vice versa.
I like hearing Noah's story, but I'm also concerned that this ice cream is going to melt more than I'd like.
So we turn our attention to that, and Noah explains the dish to me.
It is vanilla ice cream from J.P.
Licks with smoked amba salt, a little olive oil.
So amba, like spicy mango?
Like the spiced mango condiment.
We make it a little smoky, dehydrate it, add some salt.
I think there's some extra cardamom and fenugreek in there as well.
I love a cardamom dessert.
Yeah, so good.
All right, good.
There's three spoons.
Now, I happen to be on a huge... olive oil and ice cream kick in life in general.
It's J.P.
Licks, Boston Institution.
Is it okay if I spoon some of the olive oil that's on the side back on top?
Do it.
Because that's what I'm looking at right there.
Should we dig in here?
You've got to eat with me.
I'm not going to sit here and eat by myself.
I haven't tried this one yet.
Oh, man.
That is so good.
It does all the things.
It is good.
Charlie should say a word or two about Amba since he fashions himself a Amba influencer online.
So Amba, it's this amazing sauce that Iraqi Jews brought back with them from their travels and living in India.
Amba meaning mango and Marathi.
And there's an idea.
It's actually the Sasson family, which is a very prominent family of Iraqi Jews, who developed amba.
It's this amazing funky pickled mango condiment that goes on.
All sorts of things, but most notably sabich that egg and eggplant sandwich.
So when Iraqi Jews traveled to Israel after the creation of the state, they started putting it on Sibich sandwiches and it kind of took off from there.
So now they'll find it in a lot of different places.
It's on like the National Dish of Iraq and all sorts of other foods.
But it's like really kind of locked in in Sibich sandwiches and falafel shops like throughout the Middle East and in Israel in particular.
And Charlie's on a mission to have our culinary team put Amba on anything that can possibly tolerate it.
I believe it.
And cocktails?
Well, we've actually tried a couple of Amba cocktails and have yet to lock that one in.
So that's my white whale.
But we actually do have a cocktail that also tells the story of Indian Jews.
So this is the Bobazar, named after the Jewish neighborhood of Kolkata.
And it's a riff on a painkiller that takes mango and garam masala, a little bit of nutmeg, some lime and coconut, and just turns into a delicious, delicious drink, pulling on those flavors of Indian jewelry.
All right, look, when the rabbi tells you to drink, you drink, right?
Is that part of our tradition?
A hundred percent.
We're going with it.
One of the reasons it's fun to come take classes here is because you can sit around and drink while you learn.
Oh, man.
It's got a tiny bit of like pina colada vibe to it.
Oh man, that's really good.
Now to be clear while Jews were very involved in the tavern business in 1800s Poland, there's not a long tradition of Jewish cocktails.
In fact, Josh says that their food and beverage director, Naomi Levy, has basically invented the genre.
But Charlie thinks of cocktails as very Jewish, because there's lots of meaning packed into one glass.
He offers me another drink.
This is called the day of rest.
It's basically an Ashkenazi Shabbat table in a glass.
So we take challah and soak it in bourbon.
So we get this challah wash bourbon.
So it gets this kind of like nice bready flavor to it.
We mix it in with a little bit of some herbs.
So traditional like roasting herbs for chicken.
A little bit of lemon as well.
And then we give a little red wine float on top.
So like that kiddish wine, which is traditional on a Friday night.
All right, I'm going to give it a shot.
Mmm.
I love a drink with a float on top because it just looks cool.
Yeah.
But then it also kind of like gives the drink different phases because you get most of the float in the first sip.
And then as you work your way down, you get new experiences.
That's really good.
I'm starting to understand what Charlie and Josh meant about redefining a Jewish space.
When most people think of a Jewish restaurant, they think of Katz's Deli or a bagel shop.
Lair House is expanding how people think about Jewish food and culture by bringing together all these varied stories of Jewish food from around the world.
But while it's obviously about education as well as connection, Charlie says increasing religious observance isn't part of the mission.
Jewish knowledge, yes.
Jewish joy, yes.
Connections between Jews and non-Jews.
Connection between Jews and Jews, yes.
A love of Jewish life and learning, yes.
But religious observance, no.
We're not a proselytizing people.
Except about Amba.
Yes, yes, yes.
You might need to change the name of this place to Rabbi Charlie's House of Amba.
No, no, no, no.
It's a soft sell.
All right.
Coming up, I taste the Lair House version of one of Jew's most important contributions to British cuisine.
And we talk about the event at the restaurant that Charlie says his grandparents never could have imagined.
Stick around.
Time to cook up some advertisements.
Welcome back to The Sporkful.
I'm Dan Pashman.
Last week on the show we tackled the greatest partisan issue of our time Cracker Barrel's new logo.
In late August, the restaurant chain unveiled a new logo which sent the Internet spiraling and even got the president of the United States weighing in.
As you'll hear, though, this was just the latest in Cracker Barrel's long history of controversy.
As historian Anthony Stenonis explains, the chain was originally built on a certain type of nostalgia.
It's very much reflecting the culture of the South people migrating off the farms in the 50s and 60s.
But it's also fitting in with tourists from the North who are, say, driving down to Florida.
It's a way of sort of mimicking what their expectations of the South were.
What exactly were Southerners who gravitated to Cracker Barrel nostalgic for?
They're nostalgic for the Jim Crow South.
We tell the whole story of Cracker Barrel, from refusing to employ gay people in the 90s to a DOJ investigation into racist treatment of customers and employees in the early 2000s.
That episode's up now.
Check it out.
All right back to Lair House, the Jewish tavern and house of learning near Boston, where I'm talking with founders Joshua Foer and Rabbi Charlie Schwartz.
I've tasted the ice cream, which is the perfect amuse-bouche.
I've tried two of their cocktails.
It's time to get to something I can sink my teeth into.
But of course, in typical Jewish fashion, that requires more discussion.
We talk a lot about what makes food Jewish here, right?
You heard Chef Noah say the difference between Jewish food and food Jews eat.
And I would make the argument that the laws of keeping kosher, and kosher is actually one of the definitive aspects of Jewish food.
Those restrictions actually create a tremendous amount of creativity in the Jewish kitchen.
That's why we get these like amazing.
You know, every Jewish community has a long braised stew basically to serve hot on Shabbat.
Whether it's Hamin or Cholent, you know, or Daphina, you know, every community has these Shabbat stews.
Having those restrictions, I think, gives us a bigger palette to play with in terms of like, developing what it means to have Jewish food in the world.
And also, I mean, I think there's so many dishes in the Jewish lexicon that are some version of a dish that is popular in a region where Jews were for some period of time.
We lived in an area where we were fairly safe for some number of generations and picked up the local cuisine but also made changes to it to make it kosher where it wasn't kosher, cooked by whoever the other people were in that area.
Yeah.
And then usually something else happened which is at some point we overstayed our welcome, got kicked out and brought whatever cuisine we had sort of inculcated ourselves with in place A to place B, And that fusion is where a lot of really interesting culinary magic happens.
One of our signature dishes here is fish and chips.
And you're like, wait a minute, why is a Jewish restaurant serving fish and chips?
It doesn't make sense.
And fried fish was brought to England by Iberian Jews.
And it was known originally as fish in the Jewish style.
And I'm told that to this day you can go into some fish and chip shops in like the east end of London and get your fish fried in matzo meal.
So we were like, we're going to claim that as a, you know, that bit of culinary history.
But then because Charlie is, you know, all about omba.
Right.
The team invented a malted amba vinegar to go on top which now brings in that Indian via Iraqi to Israel element.
Right.
Oh, man, I can't wait to eat that.
Did I mention I'm ready to eat?
I can't live on ice cream and cocktails alone.
At this point, more food starts coming to our table.
This is our Lower East Side appetizing tower.
It's a riff on a traditional New England seafood tower, but instead of shrimp and clams and lobster hanging off of it.
Which would not be kosher.
Which would not be kosher.
Delicious, I'm told, though.
We have what you'd often find in an appetizing restaurant, in those kind of classic New York dairy fish restaurants, but through the lens of a global Jewish experience.
So we have Arak cured belly locks, We have our vegetarian knot liver.
So it's like a chopped liver, but vegetarian.
We have some curried herring.
We have some whitefish salad, pickled egg.
We have labneh on the bottom, pita and everything, bagel chips and a little bit of pickled mustard seed which is kind of like the caviar of land.
Oh, so that's not cream cheese on the bottom?
It's labneh?
It's labneh, yeah.
Oh, I love that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I want a little bit of pita.
With labneh and the lox, that's what I'm going for right now.
Okay, should I take, what's a good way?
Should I just grab a spoon?
Yeah, there's a tiny spoon here.
All right.
Is this one of your accepted combinations?
You know, it's really choose your own adventure.
Mmm.
Lox and labneh.
Like, that's a thing.
It's all happening.
Yeah, it does all the things, right?
Mm-hmm.
Oh, man.
It's like Jewish joy on your face right now.
It's wonderful.
That's what I'm feeling.
I'm feeling all the Jewish joy.
So far, the dishes that have come out are all ones that Josh and Charlie picked for me.
But I want to choose a couple more for myself.
Let's grab a menu.
So I asked them for a menu which involves more discussion, because this menu has more text on it than any menu I've ever seen in my life.
In the center, there's a box with the options written like you'd see on any menu.
But then around the perimeter, framing the food, are dense paragraphs sharing backstory and analysis of each dish.
And this formatting is not by accident.
This is the same way the Talmud is written.
The Talmud is the oral tradition of Judaism written down with a long running commentary.
It contains centuries of debate and discussion about all sorts of laws and rituals and the philosophy behind them.
So imagine that in menu form.
And so we have the Mile End Poutine pulling from the Jewish neighborhood of Montreal.
Not everyone knows that Mile End is the Jewish neighborhood of Montreal, so right next to it we have the commentary explaining a little bit about the history of Mile End.
Right, and then you have your beet pastrami, Reuben, and you have a description of that.
I've got to try the fish and chips.
Yeah, all right.
Not only because there's amba involved, Charlie, but because it sounds incredible.
I mean, I guess I need to try this beet pastrami Reuben because that's your favorite, Josh.
Sounds good.
We're really maximizing the amba in this order.
It's great.
Yeah.
I placed my order.
The beet pastrami Reuben, roasted carrots with amba tahini, salsa verde and puffed sorghum, and then fish and chips which come with Old Bay fries.
Turns out Old Bay was invented by a German Jewish immigrant in Baltimore.
I didn't know that.
While I wait for the food to arrive, Charlie, Josh, and I talk some more.
They're getting ready to host their third annual Oktoberfest at Lehrhaus.
The first one was in October 2023, just a few months after they opened.
In the summer I was talking to Josh and I was like wouldn't it be fun if we did an Oktoberfest reimagined as a celebration of German Jewish life?
And wouldn't it be even more fun if we partnered with the German government to do it?
So I cold called the consulate here and they're wonderful, wonderful people and they're like yeah, let's do that.
So we had all these plans to do this amazing Oktoberfest with the German consulate.
And then October 7th happened and we're like, how can we be joyous in this moment right now?
And we decided to go forward with it.
And the kind of intentionality that we gave to it is and I think this is still true today is that if I were to tell my grandparents that the Jewish tavern that I run the kosher restaurant house of learning that I run is partnering with the German government to celebrate German Jewish life, they would not believe me.
They would say, that's a world I can't even imagine.
So tensionality was that we don't know what the future is going to be in Gaza and Israel with Palestinians.
But we know that there are futures that we can't even begin to imagine right now, because we're living in one that a generation ago we couldn't imagine.
And I think we're about to do our third Oktoberfest in a couple of weeks.
Where the world is right now is not where we want it to be.
But we also know that there are unimaginable futures that are better than we are right now that we hope for.
We're here in Somerville, Mass, just down the road from Tufts University, where I went to college.
Tufts in particular has been a hotspot for many of the issues happening on college campuses in recent years.
In the days immediately after October 7th, the Tufts chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine sent an email praising and celebrating the attacks.
Tufts is also a place where a Turkish Muslim grad student was grabbed off the sidewalk and detained by ICE because of an op-ed she wrote.
These are both very disturbing and upsetting to me in different ways.
And I mean, of course, perspectives on these issues vary widely, even among Jews.
How do you create a Jewish space that is inclusive and joyful and positive in this current moment?
With a great deal of intentionality.
I think that one of the things that being a house of learning implies and carries with it in the overall brand is debate conversation, reverent disagreement, like at the end of the day, A conversation is usually productive.
And so I think we've managed to create a space where a wide variety of people with a wide variety of views politically, religiously feel like they belong.
And one of the things that I am disturbed by is not just in the Jewish community, but in America, we're losing our ability to... to be with people who think differently than us or who are different from us and we are aspiring in Lair House to be a place that has a big tent and that everybody feels like they belong in.
It's challenging and it's a needle that we thread every day.
And, at the end of the day, like realizing that our role here in Somerville and beyond is bringing people together.
And whether that's family members or people who already agree with each other or people who disagree with each other in a cross difference.
So it takes a lot of work and it's, you know, we succeed on most days, but not every day.
I mean, I really agree with what you're saying at the end there Josh, because I feel that too, like we have to.
You have to be able to spend time with people in your community, even if you don't agree on everything.
I live in a suburb of New York City that's very politically mixed.
I have neighbors who I really disagree with on some things, and our kids are on the same softball team.
Am I going to not go say hello to them on the sideline of the game, because I don't like what they post on Facebook?
We may not be best friends, but we live in the same community.
Our kids go to school together.
We have to be able to say hello and just be cordial and have a basic level of respect and just talk to each other.
Yeah, and there need to be spaces where that is normal and normalized.
And I think that's one of the things that we are succeeding at here at Laird House.
I was thinking on the way here like, on one hand, your mission probably would have been a lot easier if you had opened 10 or 15 years earlier, before the current moment that we're in.
On the other hand, like maybe this is the moment that Laird House was born for.
Yeah, I think that's 100 true, that the moment we're in right now and not just like politically, just in terms of people's isolation and loneliness and need to be with each other there's like a lot of factors coming together that I think that makes Lair House not just successful but necessary in the world that we're in right now.
All right, finish this.
At this point, there has clearly been enough discussion.
The entrees arrive.
Should we eat?
Yeah.
All right.
Let's, we should end the way every Jewish gathering ends, which is with the food.
All right, the fish and chips and the beet reuben are coming out.
This fish and chips looks glorious.
It truly like I lived in London for a little while and like I didn't really appreciate what an art frying was until I lived in London and ate fish and chips there.
All right, you guys got to eat some of this food with me.
Come on now.
For this part of the meal, Naomi Levy, the food and beverage director, also joins us.
This is a sfugeoli.
Okay, right.
And we recommend using the Amba vinegar just the way you would malt vinegar if you were in a Just sprinkle it on top.
If you were in a... All right, I'm going to sprinkle.
Oh, it's still so hot inside.
It is going to be very hot.
Maybe I should give it a minute?
There's a reason we all didn't just go for it.
We've all been literally burnt before.
I thought you were being polite, Naomi.
Oh, no, no.
You're at a table with a bunch of juice, right?
That's not... So should I have the beet reuben first?
Then should I let this cool a little more?
Probably, yeah.
All right.
Mmm.
Mmm.
That's really good.
You were right, Josh.
All right, I think I'm ready to go in for a bit of fish and chips here.
Yeah.
I mean, this is amazing.
I love that it's a giant piece of fish, and it really tastes like fish.
Also, it's making me realize that, like, fish and chips should have more acid.
It should be more tangy.
That's exactly what you need to cut through the... That's what the amba and the slug does, right?
Yeah.
It's doing the work for you.
All right, Josh, take a bite here.
You look like you're eyeing this fish.
I am.
Everything is so good.
There's still a lot of food in front of us.
I think this is the part of the table where I turn off my microphone and put my recorder away so that I can focus on eating.
Will you guys hang out and eat a little more with me?
Yeah.
All right, let's do it.
That's Josh Foer and Rabbi Charlie Schwartz, co-founders of Lair House in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Lair House is open Sunday through Thursday.
You can get more info at lair.house.
We'll put that link in the episode notes.
And one quick addition Charlie tells us they're hoping to open more Lair House locations around the country.
The next one will probably be in D.C., so look out for more info on that soon.
Finally, I just want to say there really is a warmth and energy that you feel when you walk into this place.
That's really special.
So I hope you'll check it out.
And to everyone celebrating Rosh Hashanah, Happy New Year!
Next week on the show, I visit a McDonald's in an old mansion.
Then we do a deep dive into the history of McDonald's and what it can tell us about Black America.
And also, I want to tell you about the episode we're reheating this Friday.
It's about a group of seniors who celebrate Shabbat every week at Wendy's.
Make sure you subscribe or follow or like our podcast, whatever the thing is in your podcasting app.
Make sure you do that so you get all of our episodes.
Finally, while you wait for all that good stuff, check out last week's show about the recent Cracker Barrel logo controversy, which it turns out is just the latest in a long history of controversies for the chain.
And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
Yes, the SiriusXM app.
It has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage.
Does your podcasting app have that?
And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one.
And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXMcom slash Sporkful.
This episode was produced by me, along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O'Hara.
It was edited by Camille Stanley.
Our engineer is Jared O'Connell.
Special thanks to Cody Fisher.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of Sirius XM Podcast.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
And I'm Liz Wing, from Somerville Massachusetts, reminding you to eat more, eat better and eat more better.
