Schmaltz Bros. / Facebook
Location: Silver Spring, Md.
Concept: Catering to specific diets has been a trend for several years — gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, keto — but Schmaltz Brothers is catering to a more specific audience: kosher.
And this isn’t any ordinary kosher restaurant. It’s a food truck specializing in Nashville hot chicken sandwiches and other trendy comfort foods like fried matzo balls.
Most of the items are fried, a nod to the truck’s Yiddish name meaning “golden.”
The co-owner Yehuda Malka draws inspiration from food trends outside the kosher world and makes them kosher, like adding vegan cheese to a hamburger for a juicy cheeseburger (kosher does not allow meat and dairy to mix).
The truck moves around D.C. and the Maryland suburbs with announcements of the location and daily menu on their Instagram. The truck has been a perfect COVID solution, especially for two first-time restaurant owners without the funds to run a kosher operation (higher costs to be supervised by a rabbi and supply chain needs).
In 2021, Schmaltz Brothers is scheduled to open a location at the George Washington University’s Hillel location, its first brick-and-mortar.