But on Thursday, the lily pads got their fill of the food mostly closely associated with the Jewish holiday. In fact, they were positively straining under the weight of cheesecakes from Junior’s, the Downtown Brooklyn bakery operated by the same Jewish family since it opened in 1950.
The food fest came during The Waterlily Weigh-off, a friendly competition organized by the Denver Botanic Gardens for the past three summers.
Gardens participating in the weigh-off — and more than 40 around the word do — The Waterlily Weigh-off 2025 measure the strength of their lily pads by placing weights on a ginormous Victoria waterlily, a particularly large species that can reach up to 8 feet across. But instead of using simple weights to test the strength of these plants, many competitors — who enter the contest via a social media-friendly video submission — use items that show off local flair and flavor.
Gardeners in Birmingham, England, for example, placed 11 bottles of gin (and seven bricks) atop their lily pad, totaling 75.4 pounds. At the Como Park Zoo and Conservatory in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a lily pad nicknamed Paula Bunyan held 71.51 pounds of various Minnesota-related items, including a Vikings football and a tater tot “hot dish.”
Last year, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden used straightforward weights. This year, it opted for a more homegrown approach.
“We knew our Victoria ‘Longwood Hybrid’ wasn’t as large as some other gardens’ plants, so we wanted to put a creative Brooklyn twist on our entry to stand out from the competition,” the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens said in a statement. “We reached out to Junior’s and they were happy to provide their iconic cheesecakes to be used as our weights. We’re thrilled with our tasty result.”
The choice was fitting for a borough with that’s home to some 500,000 Jews — a larger Jewish population than all but six cities around the world — and where 18% of households include a Jewish member.
Run by a Jewish family, Junior’s was opened in 1950 in Downtown Brooklyn by Harry Rosen. Rosen, who was born on the Lower East Side in 1904, dropped out of school at age 13 to work at a soda fountain. Eventually, he saved enough money to open four sandwich shops in Manhattan, and, in 1929, he opened The Enduro Cafe, a nightclub-like steakhouse at the corner of Flatbush and Dekalb avenues in Brooklyn.
Though that restaurant closed in 1949, Rosen did not want to abandon the location. The following year, he opened Junior’s, a more family-friendly establishment named for his two sons, Walter and Marvin.
Today, the restaurant is run by Rosen’s grandsons, Alan Rosen and Kevin Rosen. Over the decades, Junior’s has remained a mainstay for locals, politicians and celebrities, and has become something of a pop culture fixture itself: The restaurant and its cheesecakes have been featured everywhere from an LL Cool J music video to the MTV reality show “Making the Band” to the HBO series “Sex and the City.”
Though Junior’s now boasts multiple locations as well as a thriving mail-order business, one thing remains the same: The cheesecake recipe hasn’t changed since it was first innovated in the 1960s.
“I see it definitely as part of the Jewish tradition,” Alan Rosen told the New York Jewish Week in 2022 of his family’s cheesecake. “I don’t think America identifies it as a Jewish dessert, but it has its roots there for sure. We came here from Eastern Europe. We brought our recipes to the Lower East Side and you know, we went from there.”
People stand in line outside Junior’s restaurant to pick up food to go on March 16, 2020 in the Brooklyn Borough of New York City. (Photo by Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)
For their entry into the Waterlily Weigh-off, an Instagram reel shows Brooklyn Botanic Garden gardener Chris Sprindis standing thigh-deep in the garden’s Aquatic House pond, accompanied by director of horticulture Shauna Moore. Sprindis places a 9-pound round wooden platform on the lily pad, then begins to gingerly stack boxes of Junior’s cheesecakes — each weighing 3 pounds — atop the pad.
As Sprindis placed the seventh cheesecake atop the lily pad, it began to take on water. “Let me save these cheesecakes,” Sprindis said as he lifted the board, rescuing the seven cakes from certain sogginess.
“I didn’t imagine that waterlilies could hold any cheesecake — let alone anything else, for that matter,” Alan Rosen, the third-generation owner of Junior’s, said in a statement. “The only thing I’ve ever seen on a lilypad is a frog or a toad — and we certainly aren’t either!”
Though the contest runs through Sunday, it’s clear the Brooklyn Botanic Garden — whose lily pad held a total of 30 pounds — is not the victor this year. A pad at Bok Tower Gardens in Polk County, Florida, took on 183 pounds of Florida oranges and additional weights, while a lily pad Desert City in Madrid held 59 pounds of potted cacti decked out with googly eyes.
But all was not lost in Brooklyn: At the end of the weigh-in, Sprindis and Moore are shown eating slices of cheesecake atop their chosen lily pad.
“This wouldn’t be a success if we didn’t get to try some of the cheesecake,” Sprindis said. He then turns to Moore, who has joined him in the water, “Do you like cheesecake?”
“Are you kidding?” she responds. “I love cheesecake!”
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