Dovid Lieder: The Shabbat Catering King of Los Angeles' Plan For Kosher World Domination

The Toyota Tundra—black, naturally, because in the kingdom of Pico-Robertson you don’t pull up to your kosher empire in some schmatte color—sits there with its STUDENT DRIVER magnet still plastered on the back, even though David Lieder’s son hasn’t been behind the wheel in months. “People give me right of way better,” Lieder says, and there it is, the perfect metaphor for the entire kosher food industry: a little strategic vulnerability, a little nebbishkeit, and suddenly the honking stops, the aggression melts away, you can do whatever you want…

Inside Lieder’s, the $40,000 custom counter gleams under the LED pucks, that specific lighting technology that makes brisket look like it was blessed by G-d himself (not that they need any help), and here they come, the Thursday morning parade, the whole social stratosphere of Orthodox Los Angeles compressed into a single take-out line…

First, the alte bubbes with their ancient strollers—not even strollers, really, more like wheeled schematas held together with duct tape and pure determination—schlepping their bags of whatever…

Then the Beverlywood moms in their Lululemon uniform, $128 yoga pants, fresh from SoulCycle or heading to Pilates, their tax-wrote-off Range Rovers ($127,000 base price, but who’s keeping track?) idling outside with the AC blasting because G-d forbid they should sweat after spending $45 to sweat…

And then—then—the blue Bentley pulls up. But not just any Bentley. A Continental GT, $248,000 worth of “I’ve made it in Persian real estate,” and out steps one of those French guys who’ve transcended mere geography… “partially here, partially in Paris, and full-time in Florida (for tax reasons) …

But wait—here’s the real show—some alte kaker, could be 75, could be 85, who knows with the work they get done in Beverly Hills these days, shuffling in with his “Israeli bombshell 40 years younger,” and nobody, NOBODY, even blinks because this is Thursday at Lieder’s, where the potato kugel smell (“very distinct, very strong, very homey”) provides the great equalizer, and where the gravy is kept at exactly 180 degrees so it won’t congeal into something shameful…

Meanwhile, in the kitchen—that beautiful segregated universe where “the boys run the kitchen” and “the girls do prep and packing,” not by design, Lieder insists, but “just naturally”—the Latin music BLASTS at a volume and the Spanish flies back and forth like linguistic Ping-Pong balls, and every few minutes another oven door SLAMS and releases a new cloud of puff pastry perfume or chocolate babka aromatherapy into the atmosphere…

The Accidental Revolutionary

And through it all moves David Lieder (himself an immigrant from Australia), in his uniform of Lucky Brand polo from Nordstrom Rack—black or navy blue only, a hat that says “Yes Chef” on it—and his Hokas that last exactly three months before the kosher kitchen murders them, two pairs at a time, always two pairs, black-on-black for Shabbos, gray-and-white for the gym he’s perpetually about to go to…

No watch. No wedding ring. (“I don’t wear a watch; I don’t wear a wedding ring.”) Just the essentials. The anti-status status symbols of a man who’s beyond proving anything to anybody, who learned somewhere along the way that in the kosher food business, the real power move is to help your competition steal your customers… but before we talk about that…

The Two-Day Heresy

Growing up in Australia as one of FOURTEEN children! —the kitchen wasn’t just a room, it was a battlefield, a factory, a laboratory of controlled chaos where his Hungarian grandmother’s recipes got passed down like tactical intelligence…

“I was always cooking as a kid,” he says, but cooking for fourteen isn’t cooking—it’s logistics, it’s military planning, it’s learning that constraints don’t limit you, they define you…

The move to America in 2003—leaving everything behind, the classic immigrant hustle, except instead of driving a cab or opening a corner store, Lieder was about to revolutionize an entire industry by accident…

2009: A rabbi asks him to cater the synagogue’s Friday night dinner. “One dinner! A favor!” And suddenly the phone starts ringing— “Can you do my son’s bar mitzvah?” “Can you do our Shabbos meals?” “Do you deliver?”

And for five years, he operates out of that synagogue kitchen, renting it like some kind of culinary squatter, building his reputation one cholent at a time, that is, until 2014 when Dovid decides to open his own… well… that’s the point of this story.

The Two-Day Heresy

You see, because Lieder calls Lieder’s a restaurant. And so does everyone else in LA. But the truth of the matter is, it’s only called a restaurant because its food is restaurant quality. You see, when David opened his “restaurant,” Lieder’s committed what every restaurant consultant in America would call suicide opening a “restaurant” that’s only open two days a week. Thursday and Friday. That’s it. Finito.

Closed Saturday through Wednesday. The END.

“Every restaurant expert I spoke to called me foolish,” he remembers. “I thought I was foolish,” he says… and you can hear the satisfaction in his voice. “Every consultant said I’d fail.”

But Dovid had discovered something the experts missed—in the kosher world, scarcity isn’t a weakness, it’s a SUPERPOWER…

Or as he put it: “When you can only serve customers twice a week, mediocrity isn’t an option. Every dish becomes an event. Every service becomes sacred.” Before he knew it, Lieders not only became successful, but a staple of the LA Kosher scene. It’s hard to go to a Shabbos table without finding the Lieder’s signature logo on at least one item. But there is perhaps no greater testament to Lieder’s success than the success of the restaurant just down the street. Let me explain.

The Competition Revelation

Six months ago, the phone rings. It’s Lenny. Yes, that LENNY! The one who some people think’s last name is Casita. Anyway, he has the chutzpah, the unmitigated GALL, to call up David Lieder and say: “I’m opening a Shabbos takeout…” and then ask for pointers.

The community held its breath. The yentas were already sharpening their tongues. The rabbis were preparing their neutral statements. Everyone was waiting for the WAR…

“I had two choices,” Lieder recalls. “Fight or help.”

He decided to help. More than that even. When Lenny’s fridge broke down, Dovid lent him -LENT HIM - one of his. I happened to be walking down Pico that day and watched the two of them literally wheel a giant fridge down the crooked sidewalks of Pico together. I remember making one of my sarcastic NY jokes. I didn’t realize a mitzvah was taking place.

But the truth that a lot of people don’t know is that Lieders had already helped.

When Lenny first moved into his first location Lieder’s LOANED Lenny equipment! He TAUGHT him the business! He practically GIFT-WRAPPED his own competition!

“So, when I decided to help him compete with me for Shabbos takeout people thought I was crazy. Even I thought I was crazy,” he says, but then something extraordinary happened—the competition was, as it often is, great for both businesses. Both businesses grew, and Lieder discovered something that would change everything: “I wasn’t hurting my business. I was creating a new one.”

Not Lenny’s business—his OWN new business: helping other people provide kosher food all over LA, America…and one day the world. Which is easier said than done.

The Excellence Imperative

Because here’s where Lieder gets heated—HEATED! —but not too heated… more like one of his carefully temperature-controlled briskets…

“There’s this advice everyone gives,” he says, his voice rising. “‘Just don’t advertise it as kosher, make the food so good that everyone eats there.’ It’s the most repeated advice for kosher restaurants. It’s also the most DELUSIONAL.”

He’s pacing now, past the $10,000 grab-and-go fridges, past the decorative lamps they installed before they “fully knew their vision,” past the LED channel lighting that makes everything look like a Spielberg movie…

“Non-Jews won’t tolerate their favorite restaurant being closed Friday night and Saturday. They’ll find somewhere else. Permanently.”

But the REAL problem—the problem that makes Lieder’s blood boil (but only at exactly 180 degrees so it doesn’t congeal) —is that the kosher market has accepted mediocrity as the price of observance…

“Small Jewish communities are so grateful for ANY kosher option that standards plummet. Owners operate as community service, not businesses. Excellence becomes optional.”

He stops, turns, and delivers the verdict: “You’ve created a captive market that rewards survival, not success.” Dovid wants to change all that. But first… (as anyone who has ever changed the world knows), it starts with changing himself.

Breaking Your Own Rules

The supreme irony—the DELICIOUS paradox—is that the very constraints that built Lieder’s empire are now its ceiling…

“You can’t franchise scarcity. You can’t scale exclusivity. You can’t grow by staying small.”

So now, after sixteen years of Thursday-Friday militancy, Lieder’s is going daily. DAILY! The heretic becomes the conformist! The revolutionary becomes the establishment!

“Not because the two-day model failed,” he insists, “but because it succeeded so well that staying there would be the real failure.”

His hands—which used to feel like he’d been “swimming for ten hours” after a shift, all pruned up inside the gloves—barely touch the food anymore.

He’s knee-deep in Dan Martell’s coaching program to buy back his time. He’s got Stuart running day-to-day operations. He’s got an executive assistant (worth every penny). He’s got a marketing team for Lieder’s and a publicist for his personal brand. He’s got AI-powered systems scanning invoices and calculating food costs down to the penny…

The kid who started cooking in a kitchen with fourteen siblings, who spent five years as a culinary squatter in a synagogue, who built a kosher empire on two days a week, who is now teaching his son Ellie the business, creating what he calls “a family business for my children” …

The Mentor’s Prophecy

People always ask if Lieder’s is a family business, like my grandfather started it,” Lieder says, standing in front of those LED-lit counters where his grandmother’s Hungarian recipes get transformed into Thursday morning gold. “I tell them yes—it’s a family business for my children.”

But the REAL family business—the REAL empire—isn’t the restaurants or the catering or even the secret recipes that had to be extracted from years of “just knowing” and turned into precise measurements for the AI system…

It’s this: “I want to make restaurant-quality kosher food available anywhere in the world a Yid needs to eat.” In other words, David plans on becoming the world's first and greatest kosher logistics hospitality expert.

Need kosher food for a special business convention in the Marshall Islands? Ask David Lieder.

Need to get kosher food to five Jewish doctors visiting the jungle deep in the Congo? Ask David Lieder.

Need kosher food for special guests at the White House? Ask David Lieder.

That’s a big hairy goal. So, I ask him if that includes Los Angeles as well. He smiles.

Need to provide kosher food at the Olympics?

I ask if that includes more locally to which he responds by saying something only a man confident in his own abilities could say:

“I already helped Lenny. I’d love to see how many restaurants I can help compete with me.”

COMPETE WITH HIM! The man wants to create his own competition! It’s like Coca-Cola teaching Pepsi the secret formula! It’s like—

“Every constraint contains an opportunity,” he says, surveying his Thursday morning kingdom, where the ultra-Orthodox black hats stand in line behind the yoga moms, where the French real estate moguls wait patiently behind the alte bubbes with their duct-taped strollers, where the potato kugel smell makes everyone equal, at least for a moment…

“Most people see the walls. I’ve learned to see the doors.”

And with that, David (I don’t wear a watch) Lieder—Lucky Brand polo, three-month Hokas—heads back into the kitchen where the Latin music BLASTS and the boys run the show and the girls pack the orders and everything, EVERYTHING, is kept at exactly the right temperature, not one degree more, not one degree less, because in the kosher food business, in the Thursday morning kingdom of Pico-Robertson soon to be the world, excellence isn’t optional anymore…

It’s the only option left.

The revolution, as they say in the synagogue kitchens of Los Angeles, has only just begun serving its appetizers.