Shashleek, Plov and More, January 18, 2006, New York Times, by Julia Moskin
Sunday is family night out in Rego Park, Queens. All 10 tables at Restaurant Salute
are crowded with pots of green tea and piles of Uzbek plov, a cumin-scented pilaf
of rice, carrots and chickpeas. In the kitchen, lamb shashleek sizzles over a live
charcoal fire, helped along by a hair dryer slung near the grill that blasts up flames
to sear the meat. Snatches of Russian, Hebrew, Uzbek, Farsi and Tajik can be
heard, and babies are passed from lap to lap, bottles of vodka from table to table.
For centuries, a traditional Central Asian "restaurant" was little more than a pit stop
for merchants and shepherds traveling the difficult road over the Pamir peaks; the
ancients called the region the "roof of the world." These chai khanas, or tea
houses, provided travelers with a place to warm themselves with pots of green
tea, and, if they were lucky, platters of plov and shashleek.
The geopolitical upheavals of the 20th century sent tens of thousands of people
to New York from the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and
Kyrgyzstan, as well as Afghanistan and western China. Separated from Russia by
the vast Kazakhstan steppe, straddled by mountains that stretch from
Afghanistan's Hindu Kush, all the way to China and the Himalayas, this region is
home to the Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Tashkent, Dushanbe and Bukhara.
For more than 2,000 years, Central Asia was also home to the Bukharians, one of
the most isolated Jewish communities in the world, who evolved a unique
language, blending Farsi and Hebrew, that scholars call Judeo-Persian and locals call
Bukhori. Neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi (the two major groups of Diaspora Jews), the
Bukharians say that their lineage goes directly back to the Babylonian captivity,
before 500 B.C. "Our people are the ones who did not return to Jerusalem
afterward, but remained in Asia," said Peter Pinkhasov, a paralegal at a Manhattan
law firm who immigrated with his family from Tashkent in 1993.
According to the Research Institute for New Americans, about 40,000
Bukharian Jews have settled in New York since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Bukharians have since established a thriving commercial strip along 108th
Street in Rego Park, now called Bukharian Broadway, and opened several
restaurants that serve their traditional cooking, based on charcoal-grilled lamb, rice,
beets, potatoes, carrots and spices like cumin, paprika and chili. Reflecting the
influence of the silk and spice trades, there are tastes of China and India everywhere.
Every Bukharian menu offers chili-spiked Korean carrots, koreyska morkovcha, that is a legacy of Stalin's mass deportations of ethnic Koreans from the
far eastern Soviet Union to its Central Asian interior.
New York's Bukharian community makes up about 15% of the
Russian-speaking Jews in the city, and first followed the Russians to Brighton Beach in
Brooklyn, said Solomon Moses, owner of Salute. "But even though we all speak
Russian, our customs and our religion are different. And our food is
different," he added.