eat Home > Restaurant Reviews

Right now Coke addicts everywhere, be they Jew or gentile, Protestant or Catholic, are united in locating a stash of The Real Thing: Coca-Cola made with sugar instead of corn syrup. Ever since 1935 A.D. (or C.E., if you don’t subscribe to the whole Jesus thing), America’s favorite nonalcoholic beverage and greatest cultural symbol has been certified kosher by designated representatives of the Children of Israel, but around this time of year it’s different; specially marked containers house a slight tweaking of Coke’s “Original Formula” making the bubbly brown bellywash “kosher for Passover” by removing the usual high-fructose corn syrup sweetener (corn ain’t kosher, l’Pesach) in favor of sucrose, aka sugar, from sugar cane or sugar beets, which is what used to go in Coca-Cola back in the Good Old Days, before the flavor was compromised by the machinations of agri-giants like Archer Daniels Midland and high-fructose corn syrup became cheaper. We scored our Coke (three two-liter bottles for $4) at a Pikesville Giant, and the containers are identifiable by yellow caps marked with Hebrew letters and the word passover inked faintly on the side of the bottle. In a highly unscientific blind taste test against regular Coke, the KP Coke proved a soupçon less sweet and lacked the cloying mouthfeel of the corn-sweetened version. So the yellow-tops are the bomb, but move fast, because they only hit the street once a year. And yeah, there’s Passover Pepsi, too.