Tip Top Brings Taste of Israel to Atlanta Seders
Israelis Yehonatan Hazot and David Malka are prepared for their first Passover at Tip Top Kosher Market.
Kevin Madigan is a senior reporter for the Atlanta Jewish Times.
There is no shortage of kosher food in the Atlanta area, but one emporium has made quite a name for itself in the short time it has been in business.
Opened last summer by two Israelis, Yehonatan Hazot and David Malka, Tip Top Kosher Market in Chamblee is both a store and a delicatessen that prides itself on serving and selling food products rarely found elsewhere in the South.
“Come and sit. I want you to try our hummus, OK?”
That was the friendly greeting from Micka Lewit, the manager of Tip Top, when an AJT reporter arrived during a busy weekday lunchtime. Lewit came to Atlanta from Israel after serving in the army and working for eight years in a Tel Aviv restaurant with her brother, who was the owner.
“It was what we needed to do here,” she said. “The community needed it.”
This will be the store’s first Passover, and the staff is going to great lengths to make it special. Lewit herself assembled 60 gift baskets and was confident she would sell every one.
“For Passover we have some good deals, like the matzahs, they are great quality and on sale. All the chocolates, cookies and everything, all from Israel. Nobody else has them,” she said. “People get superexcited when they see the wine cookies, ‘My G-d, I haven’t seen those for like 15 years.’ We sold 20 boxes already. Every Israeli knows them.”
Tip Top has meat that is kosher for Passover — steaks, chicken, lamb chops, beef kebab — and Lewit singled out King’s Highway as one of the more popular brands.
“This is all stuff you can’t get in Costco, Kroger or Spicy Peach,” she said.
Then there are seeds: sunflower, watermelon, pumpkin and a mix pack. You can get sweetened pecans, cashews, almonds, cakes, cereal, chocolate bars, matzah covered in chocolate, burekas and malawach.
Fancy a natural juice? Tip Top has apple, strawberry-banana, mango, pineapple, orange and lemonade. And it’s all kosher for Passover.
In Tip Top’s restaurant, Lewit is hard-pressed to say what customers like the most, but the aforementioned hummus did come up in conversation. She is updating the menu for a relaunch right after Passover. “I’m going to put it on Yelp,” she said. “I’m doing coupons like the Americans do for the lunch menu. If you buy a meal, you get dessert for free, stuff like that.”
Business is up lately, and customers are coming from Acworth, Woodstock, Lawrenceville, Duluth, Stone Mountain and East Atlanta, Lewit said. “And it’s not just Jews.”
Tip Top’s plans include another location in Alpharetta “because there’s an even bigger community over there,” Lewit said. Other ideas are being thrown around, but she refrained from discussing them to avoid jinxing them.
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