3 weeks’ feasting: Gourmet Glatt rocks the holidays

As the Jewish world focuses on teshuva and spiritually preparing for the New Year, it is also gearing up for three sets of three-day yomim tovim (holidays), with Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot falling on Thursdays and Fridays followed by Shabbat.

Careful planning for this confluence of feast days by Gourmet Glatt, a kosher supermarket in Cedarhurst, may make holiday food shopping and preparation a bit easier.

The store began gearing up for the High Holidays on July fourth, said Yoeli Steinberg, Gourmet Glatt’s general manager.

“Everybody has notes from last Rosh Hashanah — what ran short, what didn’t sell. We try to fine tune the product ranges and refine the quantities,” he said.

Steinberg sits in a camouflaged office looking out on the store, a battery of computers arranged around the perimeter desk, a decorated birkat haesek (blessing for business) on the wall. Both casual and harried shoppers find a clean, attractive, well lit, well stocked, easy to navigate supermarket.

The store has partnered with famous area vendors — Zomick’s bakery, Chap-A-Nosh deli, Ossie’s fish market (with plenty of fish heads for Rosh Hashanah) and Schwartz’s appetizing — to create a seamless shopping experience that attracts people from a wide area beyond the Five Towns. Steinberg noted that someone from Belgium took a detour from JFK airport to buy some herring.

Meat and poultry cases stretch across the back of the store, with 12 butchers — more this time of year, said Steinberg, providing Rosh Hashanah specialties such as tongue, half of a sheep’s head, and various roasts. There are also prepared meats and poultry (to ease the burden of cooking for up to six meals in a row), and fresh Gourmet Glatt sausages and organic beef.

The store has large, varied grocery, dairy and produce departments, two aisles of frozen foods, gift baskets, parve ice cream cakes, and a range of gluten free products. “They can still enjoy their yontif and have just about everything,” said Steinberg in reference to people with special dietary needs.

He pointed to a “full line of color coded kosher kitchen utensils”: red, blue and green.

Flowers range from “simple bouquets” to “arrangements already in vases,” he said.