Tucked in the corner of a shopping center on Nebel Street near its intersection with Randolph Road in Rockville sits Medina Cuisine, a gourmet kosher catering company that opened its first storefront back in March.
The bakery offers a wide variety of baked goods, as well as fresh and frozen prepared meals, snacks and a selection of unique wines.
“We offer prepared foods, but we don’t make anything like a restaurant would or a café that would make sandwiches a la carte with a menu,” Michael Medina, the owner of Medina Cuisine, said. “You can walk in, especially on Thursdays and Fridays, and we have a fridge full of prepared foods.”
The bakery packs its frozen foods into microwave-safe containers for customers to take home, and the baked goods are all preservative-free.
“Everything here is very homemade and no preservatives,” Medina added. “A lot of this won’t last more than a few days, so everything stays very, very fresh.”
Medina, who was born and raised in Montreal in a large Jewish Moroccan community, said he started his business 15 years ago because there was a “lack of good kosher food.”
Originally the head of marketing at a tech company, Medina said he was looking for something new, and when the opportunity arose, he took it.
“The opportunity actually was a restaurant,” said Medina. “I used to own Distrikt Bistro, so that was a sit-down, fine-dining restaurant with steak and lamb chops. From there, I started doing more and more catering, and I realized that, really, catering is where it’s at.”
Behind the storefront is the company’s main business, its catering company. In the back sits the tasting room and three kitchens: one for dairy, one for meat and one for the baked goods.
Medina said that during COVID, he had a lot of requests for Shabbat or other holiday dinners. He would prepare the food for smaller occasions, and the patrons would come to pick up their meals at the kitchen’s loading dock.
“People came to us, and we created a following,” Medina added.
During that time, the catering company created a “Shabbat in the Box,” where every week, it would create a new themed Shabbat menu. Medina said that, each week, at least half of their customers came to pick up the food because they lived close by, but the kitchen didn’t have a space for a pickup area in the front.
“The dream was to always have a place that people are going to go to and pick up [food],” Medina said. “Why not give them at least a nice place to sit down or a nice place to walk into, maybe sell some other things?”
Medina said one of the challenges of getting the bakery storefront up and running was finding a space where they could have the storefront and a big enough kitchen for the catering side of the business.
“It was very hard to find a place,” he said. “This place came up last year as just a needle in a haystack. We were lucky. We found a location that’s pretty central, being in Rockville, very close to north Bethesda. You have that community feel right off the bat. We do have a lot of walk-ins that are not Jewish, let alone Jews who are not kosher, who come patronize and want to make sure that we offer a very good product and service.”
Medina said that the catering company is still first for the business, and that sometimes the baked goods in the cases at the storefront are actually made with the food from the events, but are set aside for the bakery, contributing to the rotation of menu items. Some items, however, are staples for the bakery, such as their soups and challah breads.
“We don’t want to be that caterer or storefront that only serves Orthodox Jews or only kosher-eating clients,” said Medina. “We want to make sure everybody knows that anybody can walk in here and feel super comfortable and have really good-tasting food and be treated well.”
mresnicow@midatlanticmedia.com
