For Jewish communities, Chinese food is more than a Christmas tradition – they’re also walking the wok

For nearly a century, a ritual has become so entrenched in the Jewish experience in North America that it has become shorthand: Every Christmas, while much of the country gathers around a roast or a turkey, Jewish families gather around a Lazy Susan for ginger beef and egg rolls. The clatter of porcelain in a brightly lit dining room is the quintessential soundtrack for this beloved tradition.

This bond was forged in the heat of urban necessity. In the mid-20th century, Chinese restaurants often functioned as rare neutral zones in cities divided by rigid social hierarchies. For Jewish immigrants, these spaces offered a dual sanctuary: Chinese cuisine’s typically dairy-free menus happened to also be kosher – or at least kosher in appearance, with pork that was minced or hidden – and a social environment free of antisemitic gatekeeping allowed people to eat with dignity. In the geography of the outsider, the Chinese restaurant was a safe place where no one looked twice at a family that didn’t belong in a cathedral or a country club. 

By 2025, however, this narrative of passive consumption has grown stale. The Jewish-Chinese relationship has moved beyond the quiet refuge of “safe treyf,” that practised avoidance of blatant non-kosher transgressions. Now, we are seeing the emergence of the “Jewish Wok”: a practitioner-led movement where Jewish Canadians are commanding the Chinese kitchen, moving from loyal customers to custodians of a craft.

Critics might call this cultural appropriation, but that framing misses the mutual exchange at work. Appropriation is a one-way street of extraction, and this is a multigenerational conversation: the culinary counterpart to the garment districts of Montreal and Toronto, where Jewish patternmakers and Chinese seamstresses laboured side by side, exchanging language and rituals across decades. Cultures do not exist in vacuums. They breathe on one another – and the “Jewish Wok” is proof.

One high-profile face of this change is David Schwartz, the Toronto restaurateur behind Mimi Chinese and Sunnys Chinese. Raised in a Jewish household where Sunday dim sum was a sacred ritual, Mr. Schwartz studied the unique regional complexities of Chinese cuisines. In 2023, he won the Michelin Young Chef Award. His kitchens display mastery of China’s diverse cuisines: Sichuan dan dan noodles, Xinjiang lamb fried rice, and a precise attention to wok hei, the elusive, smoky “breath of the wok.” 

This is a cosmopolitan expression of shared Canadian history. Jewish and Chinese communities in cities were bound by a sense of otherness and a common map of exclusion. On Toronto’s Spadina Avenue and Montreal’s Boulevard Saint-Laurent, they lived and worked within the same urban grids, neighbours in “The Ward” and “The Main.”

Montreal’s history is especially rich in this regard. After the Second World War, iconic establishments like Lee’s Garden and China Garden Café served as cultural bridges outside Chinatown. Ruby Foo’s, run by Polish-Jewish proprietor Max Shapiro, became a landmark of mid-century aspirations, and a “third space” where many in Montreal’s Jewish community felt at home.

The restaurant was so central to the city’s social world that even former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was a regular, famously dining there nearly every Sunday. In these dining rooms, repeat encounters and shared tastes fostered familiarity across ethnic lines, remaking belonging through food. When a contemporary Jewish chef masters the wok, they continue this century-old dialogue. 

In downtown Toronto, Ginsberg & Wong offered a Jewish-Chinese proto-fusion menu until it closed in the 1990s. Farther north, Sea-Hi Famous Chinese Food became a staple in the heart of the city’s Jewish community. In recent decades, as many Jewish Torontonians moved into the suburbs of Thornhill and Markham, Ont., the bond shifted from downtown tenements to larger Chinese banquet halls like Yu Seafood and Legend Chinese Restaurant, where Jewish families navigate dim sum service with fluency. This shared upward mobility has expanded the possibilities of the Chinese restaurant into upper-middle-class ballrooms where two once-marginalized groups now celebrate their success in tandem.

The “Jewish Wok” shows us that multiculturalism is at its best when groups do not merely live in parallel; it is what happens when those silos finally leak into one another over time. This exchange can both honour the depth of Chinese culinary tradition and be steeped in a confident, modern Jewish identity, and in so doing, become both tribute and creation.

So next time you walk into a Chinese restaurant in Canada, don’t be surprised if the person obsessing over the wok hei grew up on matzah ball soup. They are not lost in a foreign culture: They are exactly where they are supposed to be.