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The Richmond Jewish Food Festival will take place at 5403 Monument Ave. on Sunday, Jan. 16. Prepare for a feast of stuffed cabbage (above), brisket and plenty of matzo ball soup.
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Stock up on baked goods from the festival such as rugelach and black-and-white cookies.
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The Jewish Food Festival will operate as a drive-thru only event for 2022. Orders must be placed in advance.
Having worked with the Richmond Jewish Food Festival since its beginning, Rich Goldberg has worn many hats, from tour giver to brisket transporter, supportive husband and email correspondent.
“My role is what nobody else wants to do,” he says jokingly.
Founded in 2007, the festival was the brainchild of Goldberg’s wife, Diane, who wanted to hold a “very small Jewish cooking" celebration at their synagogue, Keneseth Beth Israel on Patterson Avenue.
“Turns out we had a ton of people that showed up at the synagogue, which is not very big,” Goldberg recalls.
During that inaugural gathering, dishes were organized by Jewish days and holidays such as the Sabbath, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and winding lines of eager guests quickly formed.
“We were surprised to see a lot of non-Jewish people showing up, and they had lots of questions, and many had never been to a synagogue,” he says.
Goldberg responded by giving them a tour.
After a few years, it became clear another, larger, space was needed to host the growing festival, and Goldberg and his wife reached out to the Weinstein Jewish Community Center, which at the time had recently undergone renovations.
“I said, let’s make it a Jewish community event,” says Goldberg, a New York transplant who has lived in Richmond for 40-plus years. “It was an amazing success.”
Success was an understatement, with the festival drawing an estimated 10,000 food- and culture-curious attendees each year.
This year, Goldberg has taken on one of his most important roles to date: transforming the annual multiday festival into a safe, streamlined drive-thru affair. After being canceled last year due to the pandemic, the Richmond Jewish Food Festival will return on Sunday, Jan. 16, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Weinstein JCC (5403 Monument Ave.) for a one-day-only drive-thru event.
“It should be pretty smooth,” says Goldberg, who recently retired from a career as a computer programmer. He says that when the festival didn't take place in 2020, he received an outpouring of messages.
“They kept emailing me and said, ‘Can’t we have something, maybe, please?’ ” he says.
With planning kicking off in September, the past few months have been spent working out logistics from music to storage to a route for cars to navigate when guests pick up their take-home meals.
The festival typically features live music, and Goldberg, who is also a keyboard player, has obtained recordings from the bands that would’ve played the event had it been held in person and will broadcast them on Sunday.
“People can tune into a radio station while waiting for food to be delivered,” he says.
Dishes for the event, mostly family recipes, are prepared months in advance in a small 10-by-25-foot volunteer-led kitchen at the synagogue — the ovens were replaced last year — before being transported via vans to a cold-storage facility.
The year, the menu is a condensed version of heat-and-eat fan favorites including beef brisket — in past years, Goldberg says, his wife and other volunteers have been known to prepare thousands of pounds of it a day — along with stuffed cabbage and the noodle casserole kugel. Other menu items include roast chicken, knishes, matzo ball soup and kosher beef hot dogs. For dessert, Bubbie’s bakery has prepared macaroons, black-and-white cookies, almond horns, and chocolate chip and chocolate-cherry mandels, each $3.
Also on the bakery menu is rugelach, one of the festival’s tightly protected secret recipes. A rolled dough with cinnamon and spices that is stuffed with a strawberry-nut filling, its step-by-step process is known by only a handful of individuals.
“One of the recipes one of the older women in the congregation prepared has only been told to one other person,” Goldberg says. “The recipe was only given to her granddaughter and so closely guarded they choose the people to make it at the synagogue.”
Orders for the festival must be made online. Upon arrival at the JCC, cars will be directed to pull into the back parking lot, where they will be guided to a pickup area to collect their food. And while boxing up brisket and waving to attendees in their cars may not be the ideal way to host the event, Goldberg says the festival volunteers are just happy to be connecting with the community again.
“We're very excited, even if it’s not an indoor festival, just excited to get food out to people that really enjoy it,” he says. “People love to go out to these food festivals, and it’s great to see people liking all the food festivals and wanting to learn more about Jewish food and Jewish culture. It's a wonderful feeling.”
