Chef Cooks Up New Menu

By COLlive reporter
Photos by Levik Hertzel

There are at least two things in the world that Jose Edgardo Soto knows well: Food and Crown Heights.

Raised by his grandmother in the Brooklyn neighborhood populated by African Americans and chassidic Jews, he remembers the Lubavitcher Rebbe walking to 770 Eastern Parkway.

“I feel so privileged that I got see the Rabbi for many years just by living here,” he tells COLlive.com. “I would also see him on big video screens.”

In 2012, some 15 years after he left the neighborhood, he was offered the post of Executive Chef of Basil Pizza & Wine Bar, a kosher Italian bistro located a block away from Lubavitch Headquarters.

“This is where I started out,” he says, following a 23 year career in some of New York City’s finest restaurants.

It was his love for food that took him out of the borders of President Street and Utica Avenue. At the age of 15, his step-father invited him to assist his dishwashing work in a restaurant in Manhattan.

Not many years later, he traveled to Italy to learn from the best. “While there I got that vision and inspiration to learn how to put things together and create on my own,” he says.

“I always loved to cook,” noted the burly man. “Even as a child, I used to make my own french fries. My mother and grandmother were all great cooks and made real comfort foods.”

Basil, under the supervision of OK Kosher certification, is his first stint in a strictly kosher eatery. “People don’t realize that a restaurant can be kosher and still be creative and delicious,” he says.

But it does not come without challenges. “In the non-kosher world, you can get anything and at any time. So out of necessity I started making my own products, like kosher ricotta cheese, mascarpone and creme freche.”

Andrew Blackmore-Dobbyn, a traveler and a Huffington Post blogger, says that Basil under Soto’s direction is “another great New York restaurant that just happens to be kosher.”

“Soto is poised to build on the early success to create a landmark kosher restaurant that draws enthusiastic customers from the local Crown Heights Hasidic community, and from everyone who enjoys good food,” he wrote in August 2012.

Daniel Branover, the Lubavitcher businessman and owner of Basil, explained his reasoning behind selecting a chef who was not trained in keeping kosher.

Branover said wanted to find, first and foremost, a chef who made great food. “His goal was to have a restaurant that is a gathering place for all people,” Blackmore-Dobbyn wrote.

Since taking over, Chef Soto has been working on a new menu. “We’ve been slowly integrating the new menu with daily specials,” he says. “The Kabocha squash soup, for example, is now a big hit. People really love it.”

The new menu will be unveiled Thursday, May 2, with entrees such as pasta ravioli with hazelnut breadcrumbs and lonely ravioli with salmon ‘bacon’.

But Soto fears some won’t get to taste his hard work. “Sometimes people don’t read the menu fully here at Basil,” he says.

“The Basil fries and pizza are crazy popular, but don’t be intimidated to try these new masterpieces that I have created. You will love the new menu dishes. I encourage you to try everything.”

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