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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”



nation / world
Israeli court rules that online marriages must be honored
A district court in Lod, an Israeli city, ruled last week that Israel’s Interior
Ministry is required to recognize the marriages of couples who use a virtual
wedding service provided by Utah County in Utah.

If the decision stands, it would mean that couples who do not want to or
cannot have an Orthodox Jewish wedding could get the benefits of marriage
without leaving Israel, as they are currently required to do. Those include LGBTQ
couples, interfaith couples, and couples in which one partner is not recognized
by one of the established religious authorities and couples who are committed to
non-Orthodox Judaism.

Jewish marriage in Israel has long been controlled by the Orthodox establish-
ment. Until now, marriages not recognized by the Israeli religious establishment
had to occur abroad in order to be registered by the Interior Ministry. Cyprus in
particular emerged as a wedding destination.

Israeli couples lost the ability to travel abroad to get married when the
pandemic began in early 2020. Some of them turned to an online wedding service
launched in May of that year by the county clerk in Provo, Utah, as a service to
local couples who could not safely obtain a marriage license in person because of
COVID-19. H O L D C O U R T.

Biden administration accuses Russia of exploiting Jewish
suffering The Biden administration accused the Russian government of antisemitism and
of exploiting Jewish suffering through its claims that its war against Ukraine is a
“denazification” operation.

“To serve its predatory ends, the Kremlin is exploiting the suffering and
sacrifice of all those who lived through World War II and survived the Holocaust,”
the State Department said in a dossier.

The dossier was timed ahead of an informal session Monday afternoon of the
United Nations Security Council that Russia called to bolster its denazification
claim. Tass, the Russian news agency, last week quoted Dmitry Polyansky, the
deputy Russian envoy to the United Nations, as saying the session will “be our
response to Western colleagues, who express doubts about one of the main goals
of our special military operation in Ukraine, namely de-Nazification, and claim
that we are exaggerating the problem.”
The State Department dossier quotes historians and Holocaust remembrance
institutions, including Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, and the U.S.

Holocaust Memorial Museum, as denouncing the denazification claims as bogus.

It also emphasizes that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish
and lost family to the Holocaust.

Ukraine says it will not allow in Uman pilgrims for
Rosh Hashanah
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More than four months into its devastating war against Russia, Ukraine is
sending a new message to the world’s Jews: Don’t come here for Rosh Hashanah.

Tens of thousands of Jews flood into Uman, a central city that is home to the
grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, a 18th-century Jewish luminary, annually for
the Jewish new year.

This year, their security cannot be guaranteed, Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel,
Yevgen Korniychuk, said in a statement posted on the embassy’s Facebook page.

— compiled by Selah Maya Zighelboim
www.jewishexponent.com THE WAIT IS OVER. COME SEE THE 501.

JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 11