A New Jewish Hospitality Scene Is Taking Shape on the Dominican Republic’s North Coast

The Dominican Republic's North Coast is usually associated with surf breaks, palm-lined beaches and the relaxed rhythm of towns such as Cabarete and Sosúa. But alongside that familiar Caribbean identity, another kind of food scene is beginning to take shape, one that starts with Jewish cooking and doesn't stop there.

At the center of it is Canadian entrepreneur Francesca Abony, founder of KUGEL, a Jewish-rooted catering and commissary business bringing familiar Jewish food traditions to a part of the world where nobody would expect to find them.

Building on an important history

Sosúa holds an important place in Jewish and Caribbean history. Hundreds of European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution arrived here in the early 1940s, resettled with help from the Dominican Republic Settlement Association, DORSA, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Few of them had ever farmed before. They learned as they went, eventually building a dairy and meat cooperative that became part of the backbone of Sosúa's economy.

The Museo Judío de Sosúa still holds their story today, photographs, letters, and other records kept from that community. It's a reminder that Jewish life on this coast isn't a recent invention. KUGEL is simply the newest chapter of something with real roots here.

A catering business built around Jewish food

KUGEL is a catering and commissary business with Jewish roots, turning out Jewish classics and Mediterranean flavors on the Dominican Republic's North Coast. When a client requires it, the business provides fully kosher or kosher-style hospitality. But KUGEL isn't limited to those occasions. It also caters for weddings, private dinners, and celebrations that aren't necessarily Jewish or kosher at all.

The menu can include challah, kugel, matzo ball soup, salatim, and other familiar dishes. But the setting changes the experience. Tropical ingredients find their way onto the table. So do charcoal cooking, a good cocktail, and the easy warmth of island hospitality, all sitting comfortably next to traditional Jewish dishes.

Running a kitchen like this somewhere without deep kosher infrastructure isn't automatic.

There's no long-established network of kosher suppliers on the North Coast the way there might be in a larger Jewish population center, so sourcing takes real planning: knowing which local ingredients work, which have to be brought in, and how to keep a kitchen's practices consistent even when the surrounding food culture runs on a completely different set of assumptions. That groundwork happens well before any event, not scrambled together the week of.

There's something accessible about bringing these dishes to a place nobody would think to look for them. A guest doesn't need any connection to Jewish tradition to enjoy good challah at a table by the ocean, and a couple planning a wedding on the North Coast doesn't need a Jewish background to book KUGEL for the reception.

A menu built around matzo ball soup and charcoal-grilled fish works the same way a good caterer's menu always should: because the food is good, not because of who's eating it.

For Abony, that's part of what makes the business personal. Everything is made from scratch, with real attention paid to where ingredients come from and how they're handled, but there's still space left for the comfort foods that make a Jewish kitchen feel like one.

A tray of kugel next to a plate of fresh-caught snapper isn't a contradiction here. It's just what the table looks like.

Before starting KUGEL, Abony spent over nine years as a personal executive assistant to ultra-high-net-worth families and high-profile principals, coordinating homes, events, international travel, and the kind of detailed logistics that call for both discretion and resourcefulness.

That background shows up directly in how KUGEL runs, whether it's a quiet Shabbat dinner for a small group or a full wedding catering job with its own moving parts, a timeline, a headcount, a venue with its own quirks, and a couple who wants the food to feel effortless even though nothing about producing it actually is.

Along the way, food has turned into something else too: a reason for people to gather. Serving challah or kugel in Cabarete can begin conversations between people who might otherwise never meet, including Jewish residents, travelers, returning visitors, and local hospitality teams.

A caterer showing up with a tray of familiar dishes in an unfamiliar setting tends to do that, whether or not it's the intention going in.

Some of KUGEL's catering happens inside private villa stays, arranged through Field & Villa, a separate hospitality company Abony also runs.

The two businesses naturally support each other, but KUGEL's work stands on its own, on tables that have nothing to do with a villa booking at all, a hotel event space, a private home, a wedding venue booked independently of either business.

What a Booking Actually Looks Like

For a couple planning a wedding, working with KUGEL usually starts the way any good catering conversation does: a menu tasting, a walk-through of the venue, a conversation about headcount and dietary needs.

What changes is what's available once the client wants it. A kosher dessert table sits next to a raw bar. A rehearsal dinner built around Mediterranean small plates can share a kitchen with a reception menu that leans fully into Caribbean seafood. Nothing about ordering a kosher-style menu locks a client out of the rest of what the kitchen can do.

For a family marking Shabbat or a holiday away from home, the conversation looks a little different, more focused on what's required rather than what's optional, but the underlying kitchen is the same one.

That flexibility, treating both kinds of events as core business rather than one being a special exception to the other, is part of what makes KUGEL function less like a niche kosher caterer and more like a full-service one that happens to have real depth in Jewish cooking.

Bringing something familiar somewhere unexpected

What's taking shape on the North Coast isn't just Jewish food that happens to be served somewhere tropical.

It's a kitchen with Jewish roots that cooks for whoever is at the table, from a Shabbat dinner to a wedding that has nothing Jewish about it, proof that a good Jewish kitchen and a Caribbean setting were never really at.

The dishes travel well. So, it turns out, does the tradition behind them.