Kosher by the Slice

On this balmy Saturday evening, nearly an hour after sundown, when Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest and worship, is over, Nagila Pizza’s doors swing open. Dozens of people, some clad in traditional Hasidic black, rush the counter. The first slice goes to a teenager who sneaked in through the patio. A line that’s not quite straight forms as the staff scrambles to fill orders.

Inside the dairy section of the Pico Boulevard eatery, employees hurriedly knead pizza dough and scoop balls of falafel mix. In the separate kitchen of the adjoining Nagila Meating Place, lamb shawarma rotates on a vertical broiler. A metal fence divides the outdoor terrace in two; signs prohibit the carrying of food from one side to the other. At Nagila, dairy is dairy and meat is meat, and though the twain sometimes meet (e.g., the vegi-burger with cheese), they don’t fraternize.

The three brothers who own Nagila--Aharon, Reuven and Eli Nitka--use recipes straight out of Israel by way of New York City, where the kosher-eating masses possess a more discriminating palate. For the pizza, that means dough that crisps in the oven, fresh marinara, a sprinkling of zathar (Israeli spices) for kick and kosher cheese, the manufacturer of which is a closely held trade secret.

“If I have an idea, I won’t sleep for half the night,” says Eli, Nagila’s chief culinary experimenter. Two of his more ambitious creations: Falafel parmigiana and vegi-shawarma. (When the latter first hit the dairy section, “A lot of people asked, ‘Are you sure it’s not meat?’ ” Eli recalls.)

As brightly lighted as a cafeteria, with piped-in Israeli music and a portrait of the late Chabad Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem M. Schneerson surveying the scene, Nagila attracts an international clientele. French businessmen and Argentine tourists happily munch shawarma and shish kebab. “We were recommended to come here by an Israeli tourist we met at the hotel,” says Mirta Hambra, a native of Buenos Aires.

To locals, especially young Lubavitchers, Nagila is a hangout, a la “90210,” a kosher Peach Pit. On the front sidewalk, Ari Brown, 18, and his friends Levi and Tzuri are waiting for their compatriot, David, to emerge with pizza. This week, after 10 years of bonding over slices, they’ll say goodbye and head off to different rabbinical colleges. David leaves for Montreal in less than an hour. For his flight, he’ll have packed away something as reassuring as any memento of home he’s crammed into his luggage--namely, a belly full of Nagila.

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Nagila Pizza, 9411 Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles; (310) 788-0111