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Rachel Klein
of palm whitefish salad and carrot lox.

Klein hosts a monthly cooking show
“Beat Your Meat” for her Patreon mem-
bers, walking her audience step-by-step
through a recipe.

With her vegetable-forward philos-
ophy, Klein is committed to cooking
dishes by making the most of fresh
ingredients, leaning into the complexi-
tie flavor plants are able to give.

“Our entrees are very, like, ‘What
can we do with this vegetable?’ versus,
like, ‘How do we make this taste like
meat?’” Klein said.

Along with another line cook, a pas-
try chef, two prep cooks and a couple
front-of-house staff, Klein and her staff
pride themselves on good hospitality as
much as their food.

remembers her superiors dragging a
delivery boy by the ear and turning
away a server who showed up soaking
wet after trekking in the rain to arrive
for her shift.

“One of the reasons why the restau-
rant is the way it is is because I never
want to subject people to some of the
experiences that I had,” Klein said.

As Klein found her footing at Miss
Rachel’s Pantry, she made an effort
to collaborate with other women in
the restaurant industry, including
chef Stephanie Reitano of the now-
closed Capofitto Forno in Old City.

Klein would supply beet pepperoni for
Capofitto’s pizza and made a take on
arancini, fried rice balls, by deep frying
matzah balls and serving them over a
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
U nderground punk shows are not usually a destination for
those looking for vegan sandwiches.

Nevertheless, upon entering a DIY concert in Philadelphia
in 2008, you might have found chef Rachel Klein selling wrapped
sandwiches and iced tea to sweaty patrons, tucked between the merch
tables of band T-shirts.

“My payment for having the table was just to feed the headlining
bands,” she said.

Klein, 37, has come a long way since her tabling days. Now the exec-
utive chef and creator of Miss Rachel’s Pantry, she traded sandwich
slinging for meal services and catering, opened up her first storefront
in 2012, and moved to her 1938 S. Chadwick St. location in 2015.

Miss Rachel’s Pantry hosts weekly public dinners booked out a
month in advance, private events and occasional pop-ups, serving
plant-based eats, including takes on Ashkenazi dishes, such as hearts
10 JULY 14, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
“Our food is really good,” Klein said.

“But it tastes better because we’re nice.”
Klein’s inclination toward good
service came from her Jewish roots.

Growing up in Northeast Philadelphia,
Klein accompanied her mother and
sister to Friday night services, while
her father, Inquirer food writer Michael
Klein, was often working. Klein’s
mother was in charge of setting up
for oneg after synagogue services, and
Klein and her sister would help, alter-
nating sneaking bites of pastries with
putting them out on trays.

For the holidays, the family
would cram into her grandmother’s
small rancher home, and her bubbe,
to accommodate Klein’s vegetari-
an-since-kindergarten diet, would plop
matzah balls into store-bought vegeta-
ble broth, “which wasn’t very good, but
I appreciated it.”
On a quest to recreate her grand-
mother’s dishes, Klein began cooking and,
after graduating from Temple in 2007,
began taking various restaurant jobs.

Along the way, she experienced and
witnessed firsthand the maltreatment
of working in the industry. Klein
carrot puree.

“It was really formative to me to see
someone I look up to — Stephanie,
who’s such a good cook — embrace the
way that I cook, and it made me feel
kind of validated in a way,” Klein said.

Growing diversity in the restaurant
industry has helped shift the culture
from abusive to collaborative. As much
as Klein is working to give her diners a
positive experience, she’s looking to do
the same for her workers.

As restaurants have a harder time
hiring, Klein believes keeping employ-
ees is a matter of making sure they are
paid well and not overworked, one of
the reasons Miss Rachel’s Pantry’s din-
ner schedule is limited and why it no
longer offers catering. Klein also hopes
customers are understanding of when
the price of dishes increases; it’s reflec-
tive of the work that goes into making
the food taste good by people who, in
Klein’s words, spend almost all of their
time preparing the restaurant’s food.

“You want to make sure your people
are taken care of,” Klein said. JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com Courtesy of Miss Rachel’s Pantry
“One of the reasons why the
restaurant is the way it is is because
I never want to subject people to
some of the experiences that I had”