Postcards from 92-09 63rd drive, Rego Park, CA

As many of you know, I spent the last few weeks moving across the country (Los Angeles -> New York City)

On Tuesday Andrew and myself went to an Uzbeki restaurant. The venue was lightly decorated, with each table having an eclectic set of condiments consisting of a bottle of Italian dressing, a bottle Heinz ketchuo (which in turn has a label boasting how it "Hides Grill Marks!") and a bottle of the Vietnamese rooster hot sauce.

We ordered some bread, some stuffed baked goods, some hummus, several kabobs, and two bottles of soda. The bread was semi-torus shaped in that the hole does not go all the way through the bread-- one breaks off wedges of the bread and can also eat the flat section in the center, it was made with poppy and sesame seeds and was good. The doughy goods consist of "mushroom chebureki", manty, and samcy. The samcy was a flaky, baked pasty stuffed with meat, the manty was similar to the Tibetan mantou-- a light dough skin wrapped around a large wad of meat stuffing and (if memory serves) pan-fried. The chebureki was a light flaky fried pastry stuffed with very hot mushroom stuffing-- imagine a stuffed Indian puri. I tried to eat it like a puri-- breaking off some pieces of the dough and using it to pick up the stuffing.

The kabobs consisted of a lulya kabob, some onion and tomato kabobs, a beef kabob, and a lamb fat kabob. The lulya kabob was ground lamb and ground beef. The fat kabob was very fatty, and went well with bread

A very interesting meal, worth repeating.

(by the way, not more than two blocks away from this place is a Russian grocery store which sold the best matzah I've had, charred to perfection in a way which brings out the taste of the wheat...mmm)
posted by Ben at 8:51 AM