Like perhaps everyone apart from the shooter, I don’t know the reason why, on Canada Day, someone shot a gun into Mimi Chinese, a restaurant in the upmarket, largely residential Annex neighbourhood of Toronto. The same building was shot at a second time on July 7. Crimes happen for all kinds of reasons. What I do know is that Jewish-owned restaurants have had a bullseye on them since Oct. 7, and that Mimi Chinese is a Jewish-owned restaurant, notably-enough so that it was recently covered in our pages, in Michael Kaminer’s delightful overview of the new Canadian-Jewish restaurant scene.

Whether out of paranoia or the heightened awareness that comes with working for the Jewish communal press, I saw the story of the shooting and found myself wondering, was this… you know…? I am speaking, again, not about what I think happened at Mimi Chinese (I am neither a detective nor an investigative journalist) but about where my own anxieties lie.

All sorts of visibly Jewish institutions in Canada and beyond have faced post-Oct. 7 threats. But restaurants have attracted an outsize degree of protest, vandalism, and violence. I’m thinking of Café Landwer, Goldstruck Coffee, and Limon in Toronto, but also Falafel Yoni in Montreal, the Second Avenue Deli in New York City, Kanaan in Berlin, Miznon in Melbourne, Goldie in Philadelphia, Pita in London (UK), Char Bar in Washington, D.C., and O’Laffa in Lyon, and, let’s leave it at, more. So many that your eyes may glaze over when you see another headline including the phrase, Jewish-owned restaurant. It may nevertheless impact your thoughts about the safety or urgency of patronizing the same.

Why do Jewish-owned restaurants attract such attention, over other types of businesses that, like any business, could have a Jewish owner? It’s probably just that restaurants are everywhere, more visible than random dentists’ offices or what have you, but where would this column be if I didn’t overthink the question?

With that in mind: I wonder if it’s this idea is that it is unseemly to eat Jewish food—or for Jews to eat?—when Gazans are doing without. This was at any rate what seemed to be animating Guardian restaurant critic Jay Rayner’s March 2024 hemming and hawing over the act of reviewing a New York-style deli in London. “Could I really write about a Jewish restaurant given the current political turmoil?” He decided he could, but only—evidently—with much throat-clearing appended. Rayner, who is Jewish, did not cite any connection between this specific deli and the Middle East. As in, he gave no BDS-type reason, however tenuous, for the squirming. That the restaurant’s theme was “Jewish” was enough.

Or maybe it’s that Jewish restaurants, the non-kosher ones especially, are places where Jews and gentiles congregate. To attack a café for being Jewish is a way of alerting that the space even is this thing, and of further ostracizing local Jews. Of de-normalizing Jewishness.

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If you had asked me how I imagined this playing out, I’d have said, this will be about the ‘Israeli food is fake’ thing. In 2022, which is to say, a trillion years ago, I did a column........

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