With Hospital Bed, You Get Eggroll, and It's Kosher

By ANDY NEWMAN,  NY Times

 February 2, 2003

Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times

Iso Hebaj, a chef at Maimonides Medical Center, preparing chicken lo mein in the glatt kosher kitchen. The goal is a "feel good" hospital food.

The people at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn are justifiably proud of their accomplishments. Maimonides performed the first heart transplant in the United States, in 1967, and its award-winning computer systems allow several doctors at remote sites to view an X-ray simultaneously.

But in its ongoing efforts to serve the dizzyingly diverse peoples of southern Brooklyn, Maimonides takes special pride in its latest accomplishment: it is, it says, the first institution in the city, perhaps the country, to offer traditional home-style glatt kosher Chinese hospital food.

While the traditional home in which such cuisine would be prepared is difficult to picture, even in multiethnic Brooklyn, the demand is there, more or less.

The Chinatown along Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park, two blocks over from Maimonides, is exploding, and last year a thousand Chinese-Americans checked into the hospital. At the same time, Maimonides, nestled among the Orthodox Jewish enclaves of Borough Park and Midwood, already operated a strictly glatt kosher kitchen, with a staff of rabbis to light the stoves and oversee preparation. (Glatt requires more rigorous meat inspection than regular kosher.)

Still, expanding the menu was not easy. Hospital food must be low in sodium — so much for soy sauce and MSG — and low in fat — so much for oily garlic sauces.

Also, vegetables must be cooked until a dentally challenged elderly patient can masticate them with ease, and each entrée must weather refrigeration and next-day reheating. Neither of these requirements helps foster the elusive food-energy known to Chinese chefs as "wok chi" that comes from cooking food fast at high temperatures and serving it immediately. Pork and shrimp, of course, are out of the question.

To help adapt recipes, Maimonides hired Rosa Ross, author of "New Wok Cooking: Easy, Healthy One-Pot Meals" (Clarkson N. Potter, 2000), to train its chefs over the summer. Since November, the hospital has been rotating a small selection of Chinese dishes through its menu: stir-fried beef with vegetables, subgum gingered fish, chicken lo mein and congee with meats.

"We can't perform magic," said Iso Hebaj, a chef, "but at least some food to make them feel good, make them feel at home."

Last Thursday, the hospital arranged a news media tour of the kitchen to watch Mr. Hebaj whip up the chicken lo mein and gingered fish. "Just a little bit shiitake mushroom for a nice Oriental taste," he said as he stirred a few into an oversized frying pan labeled "meat," the closest thing the hospital has to a wok.

The result, considering the constraints, was quite edible, even pleasant, in a mushy sort of way, with the addition of injudicious amounts of soy sauce (Mr. Hebaj revealed that he had already spiked the samples with considerably more soy sauce than he would be allowed to administer to patients).

The hospital's public affairs director, Eileen Tynion, noted that the Chinese entrees are also served with a fortune cookie and optional chopsticks.

"It's acknowledging the culture," she said, "not just saying, `Americans like Chinese food anyway, let's make some.' It's respecting what's important to this population."

It was hard to tell how the food is going over with the Chinese patients. On Thursday, the hospital introduced reporters to a 21-year-old woman named Huang Ya Qin who had given birth two days earlier. On her bedside tray was a roll, a piece of bread and a slice of pound cake. Ms. Huang said she had been eating mostly fruits and juices at the hospital, but after extensive questioning, she admitted that she had tried the noodles, albeit supplemented with fried eggs brought from home by her husband.

"It was O.K.," she said through an interpreter.

The staff, however, cannot get enough of the stuff. The hospital's food and nutrition director, Patrick LaMont, said that the day the beef stir-fry was introduced, "the doctors and nurses kept calling down orders for extra food."

"We were sending 20 trays up when there were only eight patients on the ward," he said. "That's when we knew we should put it on the cafeteria menu."

Vicki Ciampa, the hospital's spokeswoman, said the in-house offerings were far superior to the food she used to reluctantly order from the kosher Chinese restaurant down the street. And Dr. Alvin Steinfeld, assistant nutrition director, said that when he took some lo mein home to his wife a few weeks ago, "It changed her whole perception of hospital food."

Since then, Dr. Steinfeld said, "There's been a lot less cooking at home, and a lot more takeout from here."