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On a recent Monday night, 80 food-industry pros mingle inside Emeryville’s ITK Culinary, sampling chef-prepared bites of kimchi-stuffed knishes and smoked salmon musubi. They sip home-brewed kosher beer and kvell — burst with pride — over the success of Berkeley’s Boichik Bagels, a New York-style bagelry recently opened by one of their own.
It’s a gathering of The Illuminoshi, a networking group for chefs, food writers, restaurateurs and others in the Bay Area who identify as Jewish. Every quarter, members — Charles Chocolates’ Chuck Siegel, Pomella chef Mica Talmor and Wine Spectator’s recently retired editor-at-large Harvey Steiman among them — come together to tour, schmooze and eat.
It began four years ago at a small Hanukkah party held at the Oakland home of Jweekly food columnist Alix Wall. They feasted on duck-egg challah and 18-hour braised short ribs. Few of the 13 guests knew each other when they arrived, but by the end of the night, they had developed instant connections, bonding over their jobs — and their Jewish identity.
“I think many Jews in the Bay Area feel disconnected, and food is such an easy way to get people back,” Wall says.
More gatherings followed, the group grew and the tongue-in-cheek name — a nod to not-so-secret Illuminati who nosh — was coined. Today, there are 600 food professionals on Wall’s Illuminoshi email list, and grants fund some of her bigger events, such as the Evening of JewAsian Food and Stories held on Dec. 2 in Emeryville.
So what does this mean for the non-Illuminoshi? Seriously good bagels, for one thing. The networking group is how Boichik owner Emily Winston, who had been running a pop-up out of her Alameda home, met Noah’s Bagels founder Noah Alpert. Alpert told her the corporation was selling its original Berkeley location — and when he tasted the bagels, he gave Winston his blessing to move in.
“I have felt so much support from this group,” she says. “I’ve never been a temple-goer, at least in my adult life, but this feels like my Jewish community.”
There have been other shidduchs, too — not arranged marriages but professional ones — forged through the group, including the creation of Square Pie Guys, a Detroit-style pizzeria in San Francisco. Chef-owners Danny Stoller and Marc Schechter bonded during a 2018 Illuminoshi field trip to Eden Village West, a farm-to-table Jewish summer camp in Healdsburg. Afterward, they made pizzas for the group at Longboard Vineyards and realized it was culinary kismet.
“That’s a total Illuminoshi success story,” Wall says. “On the way there and back, they really hit it off and realized they had similar goals in terms of wanting to open their own place fairly soon.”
It was this “amazing feeling of warmth and camaraderie,” says Andrea Barton-Elson, the creative services manager for Bi-Rite, that drew her to the group. Her first Illuminoshi event was in April 2016 at Covenant Wines, the Berkeley winery owned by Jeff and Jodie Morgan. In addition to sipping kosher Napa cabs, the group noshed on chef-prepared dishes from Joyce Goldstein’s “The New Mediterranean Jewish Table” cookbook, which had just been released.
“It was this crazy combination of summer camp and food,” Barton-Elson recalls. “And it was the first food event I’ve ever been to where I didn’t go straight to a food table. There were too many people to say hi to, learn about and kibbitz with.”
Since then, The Illuminoshi have toured Berkeley’s Urban Adamah, held a latke smackdown at the San Francisco Ferry Building — Delfina’s Craig Stoll won for his bold riff on an everything bagel — and in 2018, spurred national debate over their Trefa 2.0 Banquet, a nod to the 1883 non-kosher dinner served on the occasion of the first graduating class of Reform Judaism rabbis at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati.
Back at the JewAsian event in Emeryville, members are still mingling, tapping contact info into cell phones and nibbling desserts, such as matcha babka bread pudding and black forbidden-rice kugel. Later, Capital Public Radio’s Elaine Corn steps to the mic to talk about her own Jewish-Chinese connection in a speech titled “From Bagel to Bao.”
And when Corn hilariously describes the difficulty in finding a proper bagel west of the Mississippi, her speech is interrupted by woo-hoos, fist bumps and jubilant cries of “Emily!” for Boichik’s Winston, the bagel lady. Venerable cookbook author Marlena Spieler gives Winston a big squeeze in the style of proud Jewish mothers and bubbes everywhere.
“I just met her,” Winston said. “She started showing up (at the shop) and going nuts over the bagels. Now she’s my number one fan.”
