Even the Ketchup Is Kosher

Three years ago, Eli Malol, a 27-year-old Encino real estate agent, decided to start keeping kosher. Consequently, McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr. and the rest of America’s fast-food standbys were off limits. If Malol wanted a burger, he would make it himself at home.

Then several months ago, a friend called Malol from his car. Did he know about the glatt kosher place at Ventura Boulevard and Woodman in Sherman Oaks?

Since then, Malol has been a regular at Orange Delite, which resides in a former Orange Julius. He drives down from the eastern end of Encino about four times a week, generally ordering the basic $3.95 burger, but sometimes doing the pastrami burger. “It’s a big deal,” he says, “because I love burgers.”

Shlomo Laniado, an Encino resident originally from Israel, opened the stand last year after his daughter Brooke, then 17, came to him complaining about the quality of food in kosher restaurants and the fact, says Laniado, that there was “no [kosher] McDonald’s-style place where you can get a hamburger or McNuggets.”

“From the moment she said that, it clicked,” adds Laniado, who despite having no background in the food or restaurant business (he’s in construction) went forth.

Laniado says Orange Delite’s best source of advertising has been rabbis. “They come to us, then go to the synagogue and say, ‘You gotta take the kids to this kosher place.’ ”

Not that all of the customers are Jewish. To his surprise, Laniado says, the ratio is about 50-50. Many customers don’t even suspect that Orange Delite is kosher until they walk through the doors and see the Mashgiach, or kosher supervisor. “One of them looks like Moses, with a 2-foot-long beard,” says Laniado. “They look very Jewish.”

The other giveaway is the absence of cheeseburgers. (The laws of kashrut prohibit the pairing of meat and dairy.) “If somebody orders a cheeseburger, we say we don’t carry cheese,” says Laniado. “The first thing is shock. Then we explain that this is a kosher restaurant. We lose a customer once in a while. But that’s part of the deal.”