If the name isn’t revealing enough, Traif, a restaurant owned by Jewish chef Jason Marcus, serves just that, and to an extreme.
The restaurant’s mission statement is posted on the homepage of its Web site: “Celebrating pork, shellfish, and globally-inspired soul food.” The menu, accordingly, features such things as shrimp, calamari, pork bellies, ribs and the like.
Marcus opened the not-so-originally named restaurant in April in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, among a large Hasidic population.
Besides his ownership of a restaurant blatantly conflicting with Jewish values, Marcus is reportedly “a very nice restaurateur,” according to the New York Times. Marcus graduated with a degree in philosophy and has a “respectable culinary résumé.”
So far, Traif doesn’t seem to be stirring up any major controversy in the area among the Jewish population, but that is not to say that people don’t disagree with its location and fare.
“Williamsburg is up and coming, so it’s probably trendy and hip,” Ally Stavis, of Westchester, N.Y., told the AJW. “But I disagree with the placement; I think it’s offensive to the Jewish population and even more so because the owner is a Jew.”
— Josh Lieberthal
