Keepink It Kosher ?????

Crown Heights, NY - “IS HE COMING BACK?” Clara Santos Perez was peering out the windows and across the street, where an imposing man in black stood, his face turned in her direction.

Was he watching? Waiting? Planning to confront her anew? Perez wondered aloud about all of this, wrung her hands and paced. In her agitation and dread she more closely resembled a criminal on the lam than what she really was: a restaurant manager rattled by an unusually troubling customer complaint.

It was a Sunday in late summer, and most of the night had gone smoothly. From 6 p.m. on, almost all of the 45 or so seats in the main dining room of Basil Pizza & Wine Bar were filled, primarily with its core clientele of Hasidic Jews from the restaurant’s neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Their conversation and a soundtrack of merry classical music combined to form a pleasant din.

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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.

He left after perhaps seven minutes. Her agitation lasted longer than that, as she questioned what right and what cause he had to imply that the couples at the bar, who had behaved unremarkably and kept to themselves, were somehow morally wanting.

“What’s godly about that?” she said. “It’s not nice.”