The New Yorker:

On a recent visit to Nargis, a new Park Slope outpost of an Uzbek restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, I found myself excitedly making connections. The pan-fried beef dumplings called chuchvara, small and dense, blanketed in caramelized onion and dill and served with sour cream, had a nuggety shape that reminded me of Japanese gyoza. The plov, or pilaf, flecked with carrot, chickpeas, scallions, and fatty scraps of lamb, was a cousin of fried rice. Non bread, a fluffy, chewy, sesame-topped round loaf with a depressed center, looked like a gigantic bialy, and the crisp, concave non-toki resembled a sheet of matzo—“but better!” the chef and owner, Boris Bangiev, declared, as he worked the room. “More salt, more sugar, and caraway seeds.” (He was right.)

And of course: the food of Uzbekistan and Central Asia shares much in common with the food of the surrounding regions, from Eastern Europe to East Asia. There are a number of other great Uzbek restaurants in New York—in Coney Island, Rego Park, and even midtown Manhattan—thanks largely to a population of Bukharan Jews, like Bangiev, who emigrated from Uzbekistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Bangiev is shrewd to expand to this neighborhood, dominated by pub grub and tepid takeout. The décor mixes Uzbek textiles and ceramics with the familiar trappings of commercialized Brooklyn: exposed brick, distressed tables, tin ceilings. The menu, happily, is almost exactly the same as the original.

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