OT (Old Testament):
....I filled her in on Levy’s visit. She seemed surprised, but said she would still return to Basil, though in a different outfit. “If I know the rules, I’ll play by them,” she said, adding matter of factly: “I want to be tolerant of intolerance. That’s my goal.”
WHEN I CALLED LEVY, he disputed a few aspects of Perez’s account. He said his primary objective that Sunday night was to see the kitchen. He hadn’t communicated any desire to regulate how customers dress, he said, nor had he been responding to any complaint. But he also said his kosher-certification agency had a contractual right and responsibility to monitor a restaurant’s entertainment — no crude comedians, no female singers — and to make sure, for example, that young men and women at Basil weren’t socializing “other than for matrimonial purposes.”
“If it became a hangout like that,” he said, referring to Basil, “not only would I take off the certification if needed, no one would go into it. They would shun it. Basil doesn’t want that.” He said that his request to see surveillance video was standard, and that similar requests have been readily met by other kosher restaurants under his watch.
A few days later, Branover received a fax from someone at Levy’s certification agency. It reiterated a demand for access to video feeds, which was necessary “due to the constant complaints from the community regarding the lingering youth in your establishment.”
I spoke with Branover in his grand, meticulously restored Victorian house in Crown Heights on the morning after the fax came. “I have a big dilemma,” he told me in a heavy voice: satisfying Levy felt like a violation of his customers’ privacy. Besides, he said, “it sounds creepy to me.” ....
nytimes.com |
