Once a month Dylan Maysick cooks Shabbat dinner for 90. This Sunday he’ll be teaching a Montreal bagel class in an Albany Park shared kitchen. Last Friday he hosted a dinner party for ten featuring, in part, blintzes, stuffed cabbage rolls, and poppy-seed challah—a menu inspired by the pioneering Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook (1938) by Fania Lewanda, who ran a kosher vegetarian restaurant and cooking school in Lithuania before she was murdered in the Holocaust.
Maysick’s first exercise working within a strict culinary framework was making vegan and gluten-free doughnuts he sold at a Brooklyn farmers’ market after a stint as a public school teacher. In 2015 he returned to Chicago to reunite with his girlfriend (now his wife) and launched a wholesale doughnut business, eventually headquartering at Bridgeport Coffee’s Beverly outpost. If you track his Instagram over the years, blueberry-pomegranate and potato chip-chocolate glazed give way to black-and-white cookies and za’atar-dusted pretzels. By fall 2017 he was burnt out on making doughnuts for people he’d never meet and he hung it up, taking a work-at-home job with his brother-in-law’s insurance brokerage.
Maysick offers something or other about once a month, though Ellison is expected to give birth to their daughter in early March and he’s planning to take a month or so off for a paternity break. Meantime, he’s plotting a Syrian-Jewish dinner for late April or May, which he’ll announce on his Instagram.
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