When I heard that kosher hot dogs - long a part of Baltimore's professional baseball scene - had arrived at RFK Stadium in Washington, I drove over to our nation's capital for a ballpark lunch.
I bit into an Abeles and Heymann all-beef dog, $4.50, at the stand called Kosher Sports near Section 220. It was flavorful, a little dry and not quite as warm as the all-beef dog I would subsequently eat during a suppertime visit to Camden Yards' kosher stand, on the lower level of the left field concourse.
Both ballpark meals were pleasing, but the results of the games were split. The Washington Nationals beat the San Francisco Giants, but the Orioles got pasted by the Seattle Mariners. Eating kosher, it seems, did not always guarantee victory for the home team.
Later, I rang up Jonathan Katz, a die-hard Mets fan, an observant Orthodox Jew and head of Kosher Sports. His company, in cooperation with stadium concessionaire Aramark, sells certified kosher food and drinks at stands in three Major League Baseball parks: RFK, Oriole Park and Shea Stadium in New York. It also sells at two professional football sites, M&T Bank Stadium and Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia.
Katz said he started this business three years ago in part as a reaction to an unhappy childhood memory. As a boy going to Mets games in the 1980s, he could not eat the hot dogs and much of the other stadium fare because they were not kosher. "All I could do was drink the soda or eat the ice cream," he told me in a telephone interview from his office in Englewood, N.J.
His goal of bringing kosher fare to sports stadiums has met with some success and some setbacks, he said. His stand at the National Tennis Center in Flushing, N.Y., for example, has an extensive menu of kosher items, including pastrami sandwiches, turkey wraps and potato knishes, he said.
Yet he pulled out of Giants Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands after a year when his stand could not sell its kosher hot dogs. A rival hot dog, Hebrew National, had the rights to that stadium, Katz said.
The fare sold in Baltimore and Washington and at other Kosher Sports stands is "Glatt Kosher," which, according to Rabbi Mayer Kurcfeld, is the "highest standard of kosher." Kurcfeld is a supervisor for Star-K Kosher Certification, the Pikesville-based enterprise that guarantees foods, including those served by Kosher Sports, meet kosher requirements.
