Monday, June 1, 2009

Kashkar in the news and in the kitchen
My good luck! Just as I was about to tell you about my exciting new favorite restaurant, Café Kashkar at 271 Brighton Beach Ave. and Brighton 14th St., in Brooklyn, perhaps the only Uygur restaurant in New York City (Who knows? Maybe in America.), the city of Kashkar is in the news. Last week, there was a front-page story in the New York Times about how the ancient city of Kashgar, as they spell it, is in the process of being torn down and rebuilt. Now you can just go to the Times story for a little background about the Uygur people. What I’ll tell you here is that they are a Central Asian Turkic ethic group whose homeland is in western China, and whose main city, Kashkar, on the edge of a desert, was a crossroads and oasis on the Silk Road, the trade route of antique times. By the way, although the New York Times and many other sources say that Uygur is pronounced Wee-gur, the Uygurs I have met here in Brooklyn say it is pronounced Oy-gur, or something close to that. I still haven’t mastered that vowel sound. I have, however, fully familiarized myself with the menu at this humble little restaurant, and I did a little book research, too.

The Uygur kitchen is meat and wheat-centric, giving it a Turkish feeling, but with influences from China, India, and Persia, the foods of the traders who would rest and intermingle in this ancient town.

The long, handmade noodles -- served in a red, well-seasoned but not fiery lamb broth with slices of lamb and chunky chopped vegetables, or sautéed dry with the same lamb and vegetables -- are called lagman, a word and noodle related to the Chinese lo mein. It is easy to make a meal out of either of these noodle dishes, and for only $6 or $7.50 respectively.

The baked dumplings, called samsas, a word and food related to the Indian samosas, are filled with hand-diced meat and lots of fried onions. Irresistible! I get the small ones that are four-to-the-order, $2.50. The larger samsas in fat-layered dough that is supposed to be flakey – according to our waiter, who is Uygur – isn’t flakey. Enough said.

There are steamed dumplings with a diced meat and onion filling called manti, $1.50 each, exactly the word used in Turkey for dumplings that are practically identical, just usually smaller and with a finer-ground filling. These are served adorned with only chopped scallions and dill (it appears the most popular herb seasonings, although I’d swear there was coriander in a salad or two). You can, however, also get a small dish of sour cream to dab on your manti. Sour cream! Very Russian, I thought.

Yes, this is a Russian neighborhood, transformed from an old Yiddish neighborhood by Russian and Ukrainian Jews who emigrated from the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and 1980s, then later, after Peristroyka, by other former Soviet people. For instance, Brighton Beach also has an Uzbeki population, and many Uygurs now live in Uzbekistan, escaping what they feel is Chinese persecution in their native territory (read the Times piece). Incidentally, most of New York’s Uzbekis did not settle in Brighton Beach. They are in Kew Gardens and Forest Hills, in Queens. Many of them are so-called Bukharan Jews, although they are hardly all from Bukhara. They hail from Tashkent and Samarkand, too. Now, doesn’t that sound exotic?

Café Kashkar is a Mom and Pop place, and one night I watched them stuffing grape leaves together, then Pop rolling the meat and rice mixture into blanched cabbage leaves while Mom, with the awesome dexterity gained from doing something your entire life, formed small meat dumplings. You might mistake them for tortellini, served “in brodo,” in broth, no less.

I was tempted to come back the next day to try those, but I keep getting distracted by the meats, which are Halal. The Uygur are Muslim people, and Halal is, to oversimplify, the Muslim form of Jewish kosher. In any case, all the meats are ritually, which also means humanely, slaughtered. (And no pork.) All of the meats at Kashkar are skewered and grilled, $3.50 or $4 a skewer, including extraordinarily juicy ground meat kebabs and succulent lamb ribs and baby lamb chops. The Uygurs are obviously not afraid of fat. Plenty of fat is in and on the meats, which is what makes them so delicious. There is also grilled chicken and liver, which has to be leaner, if that’s a concern.

Uygur vegetables may be limited to eggplant, sweet red and green and hot peppers, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions, with lots of garlic laced through everything, but they make the most of these and offer an array of “salads.” My favorite is the eggplant, which is sautéed eggplant with both carrot chunks and strands, diced red and green pepper, and sliced garlic. It is sort of like Sicilian caponata, but not.

One salad that particularly intrigued me is the “Korean carrot salad.” Why Korean? I asked our waiter, the more Asian-looking son of his more Caucasian-looking
mom and pop. “Many Uygur people have moved to Uzbekistan and there are Koreans settled in Uzbekistan, too,” he said. “We got it from them,” he explained.

A few days later I noticed that the kosher supermarket, Pomegranate (Coney Island Ave. and Ave. L), sells Korean carrot salad, which is made in the store and sold in the deli/salad department. Its label says the ingredients, in order of importance, are carrots, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, oil, vinegar, chili pepper, and salt. I love it, but only in small doses, a relish or condiment. What I like even more than the taste, if that’s possible, is the idea of a salad that started out in Korea, traveled to Uzbekistan, where Muslim people took a liking to it, then brought it to America where it ended up in a kosher supermarket in Brooklyn.

One more thing: The Uygurs are tea drinkers, like the Chinese and the Turks, and they make particularly aromatic, dark tea. Order some. It comes in a blue and white Uygur tea pot.