Kosher Cheeseburger

In early March 2008, a restaurant on New York's Upper West Side drew controversy for offering a kosher cheeseburger. Talia's Steakhouse, a glatt kosher restaurant and lounge on Amsterdam Avenue, offers single and double hamburgers with soy cheese, skirting Jewish dietary restrictions against combining meat and dairy products.

The book of Leviticus, in the Tanakh (or Old Testament), outlines the foods, combinations of foods, and methods of preparation combinations that are considered kosher, or clean, and those that are considered tref, or unwholesome. The mixing of meat and dairy is, however, mentioned elsewhere (in Exodus and Deuteronomy) in passages that prohibit the boiling of a young goat in the milk of its mother. Various strict interpretations of these passages have led to general proscriptions against eating meat and dairy at the same meal, within certain specified amounts of time, or sometimes with the same dishware and utensils. While most observant Jews now follow looser interpretations of kashrut, American urban centers such as New York still support a tradition of separate kosher restaurants for meat and dairy dishes -- in which Talia's stands decidedly on the 'meat' side of the divide.

The controversy broke in the New York Post, a tabloid not always known for letting the facts stand in the way of a good story. In fact, the kosher cheeseburger seems to have occasioned a mild hubbub among Jewish bloggers, at which point the paper called up Jackie Mason and other opinionated sources, and collected their quotes. The owner of Talia's has said that he finds the debate healthy. Ignored in the melee has been Talia's kosher cheese pizza, and the fact that the burger comes with a choice of imitation American cheese, mozzarella and cream cheese.