Bruin Café has offered kosher food for the past three years, yet this year, the menu has expanded because of an increased demand for the meals, said Kalifa Omar, a dining manager for Bruin Café.
The meals are certified kosher and cooked at Hillel at UCLA, a Jewish organization on Hilgard Avenue in Westwood. Judith Boteach is the head chef and caterer at Hillel, and she oversees the meals delivered to Bruin Café.
“(The kosher menu) is really getting to be a big success. We started out with a few meals, and then they quadrupled in the matter of months,” Boteach said.
Prior to fall of 2009, Hillel delivered kosher meals once a week to Bruin Café; but this year, they deliver three times a week. Bruin Café sells about 40,000 meals a week, 75 to 80 of which are items off the kosher menu, Omar said.
Bruin Café offers four kosher items: penne pasta with chicken meatballs, a barbecue tofu sandwich, a steak sandwich with salsa and a chicken wrap with cucumbers, avocado and lettuce. Students can purchase these meals with three different types of payment: three meal plan swipes, a meal plan swipe and an extra $2.95, or $8.75.
Housing and Hospitality could not be reached for comment on how pricing for the meals was determined.
Michelle Caine, a first-year undeclared student, said she tried the barbecue tofu sandwich once because she said wanted to try a vegetarian option at the cafe.
“I think it’s unfair for people who choose to keep kosher to have to pay more for a religious restriction,” Caine said.
Boteach said these meals cost more due to the higher prices of kosher meat. The animals used must be checked from head to toe and killed without pain to be certified kosher.
“(It is) very expensive meat,” Boteach said. “But that’s our religion; that’s what we have to do, or we have to be vegan or vegetarian.”
Some of the students who order these meals may not necessarily keep kosher, such as Muslims who have dietary laws similar to kosher food restrictions, Boteach said. “I’m finding out that a lot of the students are not even Jewish,” Boteach said. “A lot of Muslims (order the meals) because they eat special meat, and they don’t eat pork or lard. So they’re eating that food also.”
Daniel Heikali, a third-year bioengineering student, said he tries to keep kosher because his family follows the conservative kosher movement, in which followers attempt to live by most of the dietary restrictions in a way adjusted to modern times. However, he said he has only eaten the kosher chicken wrap once.
“I wouldn’t say (the wrap) was amazing, and I wouldn’t say it’s terrible,” Heikali said. “It was good at the time.”
David Hermel, a second-year neuroscience student who keeps kosher, said he used to order a kosher meal from Bruin Café twice a week last year when he lived on campus. As he couldn’t eat the meat in the residence dining halls due to his religious obligations, Hermel only ordered the chicken options.
Often, he found it difficult to get a meal quickly since the meals are kept in the back of the cafe. He said he used the one-meal-plan-swipe-plus-$2.95 payment option, meaning that extra time had to be spent in order to open the cash register for the payment transaction.
“They have to get the manager to open the cash register, and it just becomes a whole ordeal,” Hermel said. “So it takes awhile, and sometimes when I was rushing for class, I didn’t have enough time to wait for the kosher meals.”
Despite the restrictions a kosher diet entails and the difficulties in finding certified meat, there are multiple reasons people choose to keep kosher, Hermel said.
“One of (the reasons) that I’ve heard a lot is (to keep kosher in order) to raise the act of eating from a more animal to a more holy level,” Hermel said.