Mordy Kamenetsky

My family wondered why I kept repeating, “Slush fund, I must mention a slush fund,” to myself as I sat working on a Google docs article on the last day of our family trip. Duh. I was interviewing the king of frozen icy amazingness. Mordy Kamenetsky’s entrepreneurial spirit has taken the primitive slurpee and elevated it from a typical July 11th treat to an experience. Anxious to learn more about SLSHology? Chill. One icy treat, coming right up. Oh. And isn’t a slush fund something that you tap into when your assets are frozen?

Where did your culinary aspirations begin?

As a kid, I always loved food. I wasn’t necessarily into gourmet or fancy things, but I loved to experiment. I still like to play around — the sous vide is a favorite tool of mine for some time now and I use it for the basic proteins and even for tomahawk steaks and salmon.

Food service was always in my blood. I’m named Max (Mordechai) for my grandfather, Max Kamenetsky, a pioneer in the kosher food scene years ago. He’s probably the most famous for Shang-Chai, which used to be a popular kosher restaurant in Brooklyn, as well as for starting the New York Hot Pretzel Company. He also opened a kosher French bistro, the first of its kind: La Differênce in the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan. So I really followed his lead: I have a SLSHology location in the Roosevelt mall and sell those very same hot pretzels there.

So how did you get to that point? What training did you have?

When I was 23, I was working in finance but decided it wasn’t for me — I wanted to bring my passion for food to the kosher food scene. So I enrolled in the Kosher Culinary Center in Brooklyn, NY, under the tutelage of the great Chef Abraham Weissman. He helped me discover just how much I really wanted to pursue my dreams in the kosher culinary world. And that is where I also met Yonatan Prigran, my current business partner.