Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Food

Shelsky’s Latke Wins People’s Choice At Latke Fest — Again

For the second year in a row (and the third time in four years), Brooklyn’s Peter Shelsky won the People’s Choice Award at Latke Festival (colloquially known as Latkefest), the annual fundraising dinner and latke-making competition, which was held Monday December 18 at the Brooklyn Museum. Shelsky co-owns deli and appetizing shop Shelsky’s of Brooklyn in Cobble Hill with Lewis Spada.

“It was awesome,” Shelsky said. “We’re competitive, so we like to win.”

The Judge’s Choice Award went to Benchmark Restaurant, a steakhouse in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood.

Shelsky’s latke was a riff on the Rueben sandwich: a caraway-seed studded latke stuffed (before frying) with Swiss cheese and Riesling-braised sauerkraut and topped that with corned beef and Russian dressing.

The great diversity of ingredients found in the various latkes this year prompted us to wonder what makes a latke a latke, and what a latke should contain — and not contain — to be considered Jewish. Stay tuned for that exploration in a post coming later this week.

Proceeds from the event benefit the Sylvia Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching healthy eating habits to children and their families.

“It’s become a cause that Lewis and I really get behind,” Shelsky said. Spada and Shelsky have hosted a fundraiser for the Sylvia Center at the store. “As food people we think that what they’re doing as an organization is incredibly important.”

Liza Schoenfein is food editor of the Forward. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @LifeDeathDinner

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.