If you never tire of reading about your favorite vegan celebs (or vegan-cheating ones), then we have great news for you. All you plant-eating Jews who dreamed their favorite ‘90s sitcom star-turned-Ph.D. would write a cookbook, your wish has come true! (Ok, maybe that’s just me.)

That’s right, Mayim Bialik announced yesterday that she’s currently working on a family-friendly vegan cookbook with nutritionist Dr. Jay Gordon to be released next fall. (For a taste, check out her mini potato kugel recipe.) A regular contributor to Kveller and contributing editor at Tablet, (in 2009 Bialik wrote about how her Orthodox Jewish beliefs changed her style,) she decided to become a vegan after reading (yet another vegan-friendly Jewish celeb) Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.

While you may be familiar with her parenting advice (breastfeeding three-year-old anyone?) from the book she published this past spring, this is Bialik’s first cookbook, so we thought we’d help her scope out her competition.

1. The other Jewish teen celebrity-turned-mother-turned-vegan-turned-cookbook-author: Alicia Silverstone

Silverstone “freakin’ loved gefilte fish,” but in the past few years has established herself as one of the most outspoken (and extreme) of vegan celebs. Bialik may breastfeed her 3-year-old, but does she pre-chew her son’s food? With her own vegan lifestyle blog, The Kind Life, and her vegan guidebook/cookbook which came out in 2009, Silverstone may be a tough act to follow in terms of exposure, but the jury is still out when it comes to the actual recipes.

2. The Oprah- and Ellen-approved famous Israeli chef: Tal Ronnen

Famous for his food, not his acting, Ronnen was chosen by both daytime TV queens to teach their staffs about veganism. In 2008, he helped Oprah’s crew survive a 21-day cleanse and in 2010 taught Ellen how to make meatless stew (he also catered her wedding to Portia de Rossi). His cookbook The Conscious Cook is the best kind of food porn. Bialik might get more attention, but it’ll be tough to beat Ronnen’s drool-inducing recipes.

3. One-half of the Post Punk duo behind the Vegan Bible: Isa Chandra Moskowitz

OK, outside of the vegan universe she may not be as famous, but anyone who’s ever cooked vegan has read her blog or owns at least one of her cookbooks, especially the Vegan Bible, aka Veganomicon. (Along with Terry Hope Romero, she co-hosted a vegan cooking show, The Post Punk Kitchen, from 2003-05 on community access television in Manhattan and Brooklyn.) Though she’s not religious, Moskowitz’s recipes are filled with Jewish inspiration (they include everything from latkes to borscht) and are much more approachable than Ronnen’s (re: simpler) for the everyday vegan cook, making her Bialik’s stiffest competition.

Have another favorite Jewish, vegan cookbook author? Let us know in the comments!

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The Manhattan restaurant scene is fickle and ever-changing, though there is one constant: it’s the people and the atmosphere that often make the high prices worth it for diners. This is perhaps never more true than at Jezebel, the SoHo chic kosher restaurant I profiled yesterday in Tablet Magazine. The food was good, but not $88 steak good, and what made it exciting—at least in the new restaurant sense—were the people there.

Here are the five types of people you’ll likely run into while dining at Jezebel:

1. Jews! We all knew that was coming, so it’s just as well to put it right there, upfront: this is a place where you will see Jews. “It’s true we don’t want to be associated or compared with anyone else,” Henry Stimler, one of the restaurant’s two founders, told me, “but at the helm of it, we are a kosher restaurant.” It turns out if you build a kosher restaurant in Manhattan, they (the Jews) will, in fact, come. It’s a fun place—new and shiny, and glatt kosher. But part of why I think we, the Jews, come, is to share ambient surroundings with the rest of the people on this list, most of whom you would never catch dead at the majority of New York’s kosher eateries. Like…

2. Supermodels! I’m not saying that they were supermodels per se, but all I’m saying is that when I was at Jezebel, there were tall, shiny women who radiated ethereal beauty across the restaurant. That’s good enough for me, but maybe not for…

3. Celebrities! When I say celebrity, I mean Manhattan celebrity (with the exceptions of Russell Simmons and the New York Knicks’ Baron Davis). And when I say Manhattan celebrity, I don’t mean Jerry Seinfeld (he’s everyone’s celebrity), I mean the type of people who would only be recognized and gawked at by the type of people who would go to a SoHo restaurant and pay $18 for a cocktail while waiting more than an hour to be seated in a loud dining room where the food is just as overpriced but not as restorative. Like Joel Warren (I had to look him up too). Of course, there is a type of diner who would pretend to not care if Oprah herself walked through Jezebel’s mezuzah-clad door, and they are the…

4. Foodies! Perhaps this category is better called ‘Hipster Foodies,’ because there’s nothing quite as ironic as ordering a kosher cornish hen for $48 when just earlier that day, at the city’s latest hiptastic gastropub, you ate more bacon than the Epic Meal Time guys could even dream of. But do you know what is perhaps the greatest irony of all? That everyone on this list, including the hipster foodies, are…

5. People Who Want to be Seen! The art of Manhattan dining is the impressive, difficult feat of being seen while simultaneously doing your best to seem like you don’t want to be seen. Why else would you spend $100 plus on a night at the newest ‘it’ place in town, if not to get there and feign practiced indifference while discretely skimming the crowd to see who might recognize you?

And that’s the beauty of eating in Manhattan: though deep down everyone is just as narcissistic as in any other town, New Yorkers have enough panache to hide it. This means that you can go to a restaurant like Jezebel and make the night about anything you want it to be (except maybe inexpensive dining). I’m glad that Orthodox Jews (see: number one) can finally partake in this hallowed New York tradition. Thanks, Jezebel.

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