Kosher Weddings and the Rabbi that made me Cry

I was twenty-four years old, four years into my career, and I had just been handed my first Orthodox kosher wedding.

I want to be clear about my qualifications for this. I had none. I could not have told you what a ketubah was. I did not know there would be a curtain. I had recently been promoted out of the Red Lion at Sea-Tac — a perfectly nice airport hotel — to the Westin in downtown Seattle, which was one of the premier properties in the city, and I was the social catering manager, which meant weddings came to me.

This one came to me.

The Hotel with Two Kitchens

Here is the part nobody believes: that Westin had an actual kosher kitchen.

Not a corner. Not a shelf. A separate kitchen, with its own ovens, its own pots and pans, and its own dishes that had never in their lives touched anything that wasn't kosher and never would. Those dishes did not get pulled out for a Rotary luncheon. Ever.

Downtown Seattle had a large enough Orthodox community to justify it, which is the only reason a hotel would do such a thing — because the moment a kitchen is kosher, it's only kosher. You've taken an entire kitchen out of circulation for every other event in the building. In forty-five years I have worked at exactly two hotels with a real kosher kitchen: that Westin, and the Bonaventure.

Everybody else brings it in from outside, which I'll get to.

Kashering, Or: Setting Your Oven On Fire For God

Early on I learned the word “kasher,” as a verb, because somebody said it in a meeting and I nodded like a woman who knew things.

Kashering an oven means burning off everything that oven has ever known. Every trace, every memory, every splatter of the non-kosher life it used to lead. You take it up to temperature and you torch its past.

And some things simply cannot be saved. Porcelain is porous. If a porcelain plate has ever held non-kosher food, that plate is done. Not washed — done. There is no scrubbing your way back.

I remember thinking: this is the most serious thing anyone has ever explained to me about a plate.

The Meeting

So we sat down — the couple, the family, the rabbi, me, and about eight other people around a conference table.

And I did what a twenty-four-year-old catering manager in the late eighties did in every meeting she had ever been in. I popped up out of my chair, put on my very best professional face, and stuck out my hand.

He pulled his hand back like I'd offered him a live wire.

“We don't touch women.”

Now. Here is the thing about being twenty-four: you have no filter, but you also have no defenses. I wasn't offended yet. I was curious. So I said, oh — I'm so sorry, I had no idea. May I ask why?

And he told me. In front of eight people. That it was because women menstruate, and we are filthy.

Reader, I cried.

Not a scene. Not a storming-out. Two tears, wiped away with a knuckle, in a meeting room in downtown Seattle, while everyone politely looked at their notepads. And then I put my face back on, sat down, and asked about the ketubah signing room, because I was at work and the wedding was not going to plan itself.

I have thought about that moment for thirty-five years. It was not the last time a client said something that landed wrong. It was, however, the fastest I ever learned that my job was going to involve stepping into other people's rules without a manual, and that being handed the rules rudely does not exempt you from following them.

I have left the room over things since. A bride and groom going at each other. A bride and her mother going at each other. In forty-five years it's happened enough times to be a category, though not enough times to be a habit.

That day I stayed.

What I Actually Had to Learn, All at Once

Everything I know about kosher weddings, I learned by standing in the middle of one and asking questions.

Men and women seated separately. Men and women not dancing together. A separate room for the ketubah signing. A chuppah with its own construction requirements. A curtain between the bride and groom at one of the ceremonies. Every one of these arrived as a sentence from a client that began “and of course we'll need—” and ended with me writing it down and then going to find my Director of Catering to ask what on earth I had just agreed to.

And the whole shape of the night is different. A traditional Western reception is: ceremony, cocktails, dinner. An Orthodox wedding is a large, elaborate cocktail hour first, then the ceremony, then the reception. If you build your timeline out of habit instead of out of listening, you have already ruined the evening and it's four o'clock.

That's genuinely how my entire career happened. You get thrown into something you know nothing about, the client tells you what they need, and you figure it out in public.

Glatt vs. Kosher-Style, For Those Playing At Home

Glatt kosher means Orthodox and it means strict. The food has to come from a kosher kitchen, prepared the kosher way, on the kosher dishes. There is no negotiating and there is no “close enough.”

Kosher-style is the relaxed cousin. No meat and dairy on the same plate, various dietary rules observed — but a hotel without a kosher kitchen can absolutely handle it. Salmon from a normal kitchen, no dairy on the plate, everybody's happy.

The difference between those two words is the difference between a menu conversation and a logistics operation.

How Outside Catering Works, And Why Your Hotel Is Nervous

Since almost nobody has a kosher kitchen, glatt kosher usually means an outside kosher caterer — often a restaurant that also caters, and in Los Angeles there are many, many, many of them.

All the food is prepared in their kitchen, packed into containers, and delivered to the hotel. It's kosher because of where it was made. My staff reheats it and serves it. We do not touch the food preparation. We are, essentially, very well-dressed delivery recipients.

Which brings us to the awkward part.

The Money Problem, Which Is Also A Comedy

Hotels don't sell you a ballroom. They sell you a food and beverage minimum — you have to spend a certain amount on food and drink to get the room. That's the whole model.

Now. Do the math on a glatt kosher wedding. The hotel isn't making the food. The hotel isn't selling you the food. And the minimum still has to be met, out of food and beverage.

So a couple sits across from me and says: what can we add?

And here is where I have to tell you the single funniest true fact of my career.

Alcohol is kosher. Period.

So for a glatt kosher event, my professional recommendation — arrived at after decades of experience, careful analysis, and a deep respect for religious tradition — is more booze. Extend the bar. Add hours. That's the lever. That's the only lever.

If it's kosher-style, wonderful, we have options: extra passed appetizers, a dessert station, a coffee bar, all sorts of things. If it's glatt, it's the bar.

And every so often you'd get a glatt kosher event that also didn't want alcohol, and at that point I'd have to say the hardest sentence in hospitality: I'm so sorry, I don't think we're the right venue for you. There's no version of that math that works. You can price per person, you can build in service charges and fees until you're blue, but eventually the numbers just say no.

What It All Taught Me

That first wedding was gorgeous, for the record. It went off beautifully. The couple was thrilled. Nobody in that ballroom had any idea that the woman running it had learned the entire religious framework of their evening approximately eleven weeks earlier, largely by asking embarrassing questions.

I went on to do hundreds of these. At the Biltmore, Orthodox weddings were a huge part of my business — six hundred and fifty guests, the largest rooms in the building, families who had been planning this night since the children were small.

And I loved them. I loved the structure of them, the joy of them, the sheer volume of them.

I just never did shake anyone's hand again without checking first.