“Osher” in Hebrew means happiness and that is clearly what Sharon Siegel Langer is feeling about her new business venture, Café Osher, which is slated to open next month.
To be the only kosher restaurant in the Milwaukee area, Café Osher was named by daughters Michelle and Sarah, soon-to-be Hebrew 5 students at Nicolet High School.
It will occupy the space formerly inhabited by Jane’s Take Away in Audubon Court, southeast of the intersection of Brown Deer and Port Washington Roads.
Langer plans to offer many of the dishes that Jane Chernof, owner of Jane’s Take Away made popular.
“[Jane] is sharing her recipes with me,” said Langer, who plans to continue serving Chernof’s signature dishes, including her “amazing” chocolate chip cookies. But now they will be kosher, certified Wisconsin K under Rabbi Benzion Twerski.
“We decided to go with the highest level of kashrut, so no one will question it,” Langer said.
Like its predecessor, Café Osher will feature dine-in seating, gourmet take-away meals and catering. Serving meat and pareve dishes, the café will serve lunch and dinner, Sunday through Thursday, and lunch on Friday. Langer will be adding Shabbat meals to her take-away selections.
The cafe will be closed Saturdays but will open for private parties on Saturday evenings during the winter, Langer said.
Although she doesn’t plan to change the interior radically, Langer said that she will install wi-fi (wireless fidelity, which allows laptop computer users to connect to the Internet) and more seating in the café, which she estimates will accomodate about 25.
Langer, who was born in Chicago but grew up in Milwaukee since age 4, moved back to Milwaukee in 1997 after traveling the world. In South Bend, Ind., she “ran a Jewish day school kitchen with some other ladies and taught home economics to the older girls,” she said. She has also done some catering, she added.
Langer loves to cook and regularly invites 40 or 50 people to her home for Sukkot, she said, and emphasized that she is not afraid of cooking for a big group. At Cafe Osher, Langer will share cooking responsibilities with a chef.
Opening a kosher restaurant in Milwaukee “has been a dream for a long time,” she said. And it was born of “one of those very interesting beshert [meant-to-be] situations.”
She and husband Dan, who had just taken a sabbatical from his work as a certified public accountant and auditor, were looking at a listing of businesses for sale, which she said they “never do.”
When they saw a restaurant for sale in the North Shore they decided to call and that led them to a business broker and eventually to Jane Chernof.
Langer said she could never have accomplished all that she has up to this point without Dan, who wrote her business plan, and worked on the financing, insurance, banking arrangements and the like.
But now that he’s helped her through it, she said, he’s going back to doing what he does. “I did offer him a job as a busboy, but he turned it down in favor of a real job,” Langer said.
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