![]() Rinde was a music producer, hence why there’s a performance space there for young bands and comics that’s still going strong to this day. Genghis Cohen was started by Allan Rinde 36 years ago. Being New Yorkers, understanding the nostalgia of what a restaurant like that is, and what it has been to Los Angeles.” The recently restored interior of LA institution Genghis Cohen “Med and I were such huge fans of Genghis Cohen. ![]() 19 years ago, and have since opened The Spare Room and Winsome (which is moving to Playa Vista), along with handling food-and-beverage operations for the Graduate Hotels in Seattle, Nashville and New York.įour years ago, they were told about a space on Fairfax that was for sale. This tradition has grown into something of cultural trope come holiday season, perhaps most memorably in the classic holiday film A Christmas Story.īoth Rose and Abrous grew up in Manhattan and have fond memories of visiting Chinatown around the holidays. It didn’t hurt that the Chinese don’t use dairy alongside their meats, which made it reasonably Kosher. Being cultural outcasts often meant they couldn’t patronize gentile establishments, so Jews began frequenting Chinatown restaurants on Christian holidays because they were open. Obviously the name Genghis Cohen is a pun hinting at America’s long and storied Sino-Semite connection, which dates back to the late 1800s, when Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan found a culinary bedfellow in the neighboring hood, Chinatown, then in its infancy. “Juice bars are busy on New Year’s Day, chicken wing places are busy for the Super Bowl, but Christmas Eve and Christmas Day? That’s our time to rock,” says Rose. ![]() in a two-day span.” He goes on to say that people make this reservation as early as January. Rose’s partner, Med Abrous chimes in, “It’s amazingly impressive how a humble Chinese restaurant can become one of the hardest reservations in all of L.A. ![]() “It’s our Super Bowl,” says Marc Rose, co-owner of Genghis Cohen. and New York, this is perhaps most visible at Chinese American restaurants. People are coming to see it more as a cultural holiday than a religious one, and in big cities like L.A. Christmas is enjoyed by nine out of 10 Americans, regardless of faith. The figure echoes a greater decline in religiosity in America: a more recent Pew poll reported that 65% of Americans identified as Christian in 2018, down from 75% in 2009, with a similar trend reported among America’s Jewish population.īut that doesn’t mean that anyone - Jews included - is ready to shed their holiday cheer. Certain news outlets will crow about store clerks not being permitted to greet customers with “Merry Christmas,” but according to a Pew Research poll, most Americans don’t actually care much about it. In that moment, Allen blithely glosses over a core conflict that exists within most of us: that change is at once healthy and the thing people struggle most with in their lives, that each generation wants something new and different from the previous one while simultaneously seeking out the comfy confines of its own brand of nostalgia.Ĭhristmas is a prime example of this. He calls her beliefs superstition, and she defends them as tradition, prompting his rather sharp retort: “Tradition is the illusion of permanence.” The scene is peppered with blistering barbs ( see for yourself), but there’s one that stands out. There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s movie Deconstructing Harry in which he is speaking to his sister about their Jewish heritage.
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