Kosher dynasty ends with Tibby’s closure

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CHANTAL ABITBOL

FOR more than 48 years, Tibby Genadt has spent most of his days standing in the heat of the kitchen, cooking up kosher fare for his loyal clientele, who for generations have flocked to his restaurant located within Bondi’s Hakoah Club.

Over the years, he has become an iconic figure on Sydney’s kosher scene — a fifth-generation kosher chef who relocated to Australia from Romania in the mid-1960s to reopen the family restaurant.

But after decades as one of Sydney’s only fine-dining kosher restaurants, the family dynasty is coming to an end.

With Hakoah’s Bondi premises set to close next month, Mr Genadt, 80, has decided it is also the right time to shut the doors on the business. Tibby’s, also known as Jaffa’s Kosher Restaurant, will serve its last meal on Thursday, October 29.

“My used-by date has expired,” he jokes philosophically. “If the club would have found other premises, we would have kept on going. But probably not for long.”

Mr Genadt’s great-grandparents, Malka and Tibby Genadt, opened the restaurant in what is now Romania, in 1848. But when the country fell under Nazi and later communist rule, the family was forced to close for nearly two decades.

Mr Genadt later moved to Israel where he worked in kosher catering, and finally settled with his parents and family in Australia in 1965. Together, they opened Tibby’s at the B’nai Brith Centre in East Sydney, where it remained for more than 20 years.

It found a new home at Hakoah in the late 1980s where, apart from a few intervals, it has remained ever since.

For the most part, the menu has stayed the same. There’s a mix of Continental dishes — cabbage rolls and rice, langosh (Hungarian potato cakes) and bauernschmaus (a dish the Germans and Austrians call “a farmer’s feast”) — and, perhaps surprisingly, an extensive offering of kosher Chinese entrees.

“We were the first to offer kosher Chinese not only in Australia, but in the world,” Mr Genadt boasted. “We started in 1966. Everybody told me I was crazy. But for us, it was always important to satisfy the customers.

“Whatever they wanted, we made it for them. My daughter said they took advantage. But I loved them. I did it for pleasure,” he smiled.

With Tibby’s closing, only a handful of kosher venues remain in Sydney. Most of them are either cafes or pizzerias, such as Katzy’s Food Factory, Bondi Pizza Gallery and Lewis’ Continental Kitchen.

NSW Kashrut Authority president Baron Revelman said he believes Sydney’s kosher community is well served “given [its] relatively small size”.

“There are certainly places now that many of the community are not at all ashamed to take their business colleagues for lunch or dinner.”

But he admitted it could always be better. “We’ve had plenty [kosher restaurants] close down over the last several years. The primary reason, I believe, is that they don’t get enough support from the community,” he told The AJN.

Meanwhile, Mr Genadt admitted he had mixed feelings about closing, but was looking forward to enjoying his new life. He plans to play golf and perhaps write a kosher cookbook.

“For the first time in my life, I will do what I want to do, not what I have to do,” he said.