Cafe Avat (CLOSED)

Today, I had the good fortune to join an expedition to the Bath Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn to try a Kyrgyz restaurant that Charles Bibilos, creator of the wonderful United Nations of Food blog, had heard about. Joining us was Dave Cook, creator of the amazing Eating in Translation. Lunch with the two of the most intrepid eaters I know was huge fun – all we needed was Joe DiStefano to complete the triumvirate. It’s a fairly long haul out there, but I’m delighted to report that Cafe Avat is worth it.

The Kyrgyz Republic is a former Soviet republic in central Asia that borders on Uzbekistan and China, among other countries, and those influences and more can be discerned in the food (the chef is from the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek). As one would expect from any self-respecting former Soviet republic, there is a good-sized roster of Russian-sounding salads on the menu, but on the plate of pickled vegetables, one does not expect the presence of what is essentially kimchi (Chin-cha, or Чин-ча)!   That and the pickled cucumbers were the standouts:

I was pleased to discover that in Kyrgyz cooking, as opposed to Uzbek, Azeri, or Kazakh cooking, there is a certain measure of spiciness. Ashlyam-fu (Ашлям-фу) is a mildly spicy, vinegary, cold dish of handmade lagman noodles (central-Asian-speak for ramen), shredded cucumber, tomato, and strips of mung bean starch "noodles". Refreshing on a warm day.

This dish immediately struck me as tasting more or less Chinese. Come to find out in my subsequent research that it is a Dunghan dish. What is Dunghan, you may, as I did, ask? Ethnic Chinese Muslim (Cafe Avat is halal).

Gan-fan (Ган-фан) was a huge hit. A stew of beef, onions, bell peppers, tomato, and mushroom is ladled over a mound of white rice. One of those dishes that is more than the sum of its parts.

I was also crazy about hanim (Ханим) – my companions, not so much. Seasoned shredded potatoes are enshrouded in an ultra-delicate dumpling wrapper and steamed, served with a zesty mashed red-pepper sauce. Delightful.

The two kebabs we tried were both spectacular: lamb rib meat and lyulya (Люля - ground lamb). These are the first kebabs I’ve tried up to the quality and of the late, lamented Café Sim-Sim (because Cafe Avat is halal, there is no pork neck kebab, alas!). Juicy and very flavorful, and only four bucks apiece.

The only real miss of the meal was the home fries with sautéed mushrooms, a dish I requested precisely because Café Sim-Sim’s version was so wonderful. Here, it is merely some ordinary home-fried potatoes, sliced a tad too thick, with ordinary white mushrooms – no chanterelles. There are many, much tastier items on the menu with which to sate oneself.

The charming Uzbek fellow that waited on us went above and beyond the call of duty to make our first Kyrgyz dining experience a pleasurable one. It will not be the last.

Cafe Avat
2158 Bath Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11214
347-275-7377
(D train to Bay Pkwy, walk 2 blocks SW on Bay Pkwy, then turn right)

Café Kashkar

When I came across Robert Sietsema's mini-review of Café Kashkar, I realized that my quest to try as many different regional Chinese cuisines as possible had to include a trip to this restaurant. It ended up including several. Although Brighton Beach is a long way from Manhattan, it's worth the trip now and then for what is essentially home-cooking at marvelously low prices.

Of course, were it not for the vagaries of history, this would not in any sense be a Chinese restaurant at all, and there is indeed nothing overtly Chinese about it. Café Kashkar serves food of the Uyghurs, which is a Turkic ethnic group that comprises almost half the population of Xinjiang, China's westernmost province. Over the centuries, most Uyghurs ended up settling in what is sometimes called East Turkestan, and now comprises the western third of Xinjiang. Kashkar is the westernmost major city of the province. The area has gone in and out of being under Chinese rule, finally ending up as part of China, apparently permanently, in 1949. In the course of my conversation with the lovely fellow serving me on my first visit, the son of the owners, I learned that his parents are Uyghurs from Uzbekistan and, if I remember correctly, Kazakhstan.

In any case, the food at Café Kashkar has much more to do with Russian cuisine than Chinese, with some occasional cross-pollination. Since most Uyghurs are Muslim, the kitchen is halal--no pork! There is a fairly typically Russian selection of salads here; we had a rich, tasty eggplant salad (photos courtesy, once again, of Pete):


Lamb takes center stage here--it's in almost everything. One of the specialties of the house is lagman (notice the similarity to the word "ramen"?), a delicious, hearty noodle soup made with lamb and vegetables. "Hearty" accurately describes a lot of the menu's offerings... this is great cold-weather food.

Fried lagman is essentially Russian fried lo mein, with lamb, vegetables and egg:


Plov (pilaf) is Russian fried rice, with carrots and lamb. I liked this much more than my dining companions did, but I tend to love good fried rice:


Samsa are like baked rolls, filled with seasoned ground lamb--another house specialty:


That is one samsa there, with four parts, and it will set you back $2.50.

Manty are big dumplings filled with... your guessed it... lamb. We got ours fried:


Another cognate: manty is awfully similar to the Korean word for dumplings, mandoo. I'm crazy about the seasoning of their lamb filling. There are sauteed onions in there, and a subtle blend of spices I can't quite identify.

To complete the triumvirate of lamb-filled dough creations, we had to try the gusht nan, too. Anyone familiar with Indian food ought be able to form an idea what this is--a baked, lamb-filled flat-bread:


I suppose it is possible to overdose on lamb here... luckily, they have a selection of kebabs to add a bit of variety (and none more than $4.00): chicken, ground beef (lyulya), liver, veal, and, of course, lamb. The lamb rib kebab is really pretty great, I have to say--seen here with chicken:


Tender, juicy, and expertly grilled.

They had exactly one dessert the night we asked: homemade chak-chak. It's like a Rice Krispy treat made with fried noodles, and it's good:



Café Kashkar
1141 Brighton Beach Ave., Brooklyn 11235
718-743-3832
(B or Q train to Brighton Beach, then 7 blocks east on Brighton Beach Ave.)

Café Sim-Sim, revisited (CLOSED)

Café Sim-Sim continues to be my all-round favorite restaurant in New York. I eat here on an average of perhaps once a week, and let me tell you, it is NOWHERE close to where I live. But for food of this quality, prepared with this kind of care, it is worth every bit of the effort it takes to get the there. And folks, it's not such a bad trip: 3 blocks from the Ditmas Ave. stop on the F-train. Go. Enjoy. Return. Try everything on the menu. I've worked my way through probably two-thirds of the menu and haven't hit a dud yet.

Here's some food porn from one of my many recent visits, courtesy of Jose. Unfortunately, we still don't have a picture of my favorite thing so far on the menu, the home-fried potatoes with chanterelle mushrooms (described here). And for you sturgeon fans, Aron cures all of his fish in-house and offers two kinds of smoked sturgeon--I am especially partial to the Sevruga. Also not pictured are the sturgeon kebabs, which are, as one would expect, fantastic. But this should entice at least a few of you to give this place a try.

The "Stolichniy" salad, or Russian salad--a delicious take on egg salad, with the addition of ground chicken:


The wonderful lipyoshka bread (лепёшка), served warm:


Piti, a hearty soup made with lamb on the bone:


Kharcho, a soup of lamb, vegetables (tomatoes, onions sweet red peppers), and rice, garnished with cilantro:


Kebabs and fried potatoes: chicken lyulya (each wrapped in its own piece of lavash flatbread), and a piece of pork neck:


My favorite kebab on the menu, pork neck, starring in its own solo shot:


As I recently found out the hard way, it's probably a good idea to call ahead just to be sure they're not closed for a private party. Although it's not a bad trip if one gets to eat upon ones arrival, it's a huge annoyance to be go and be turned away, and you'll get no apology from anyone for it.

Café Sim-Sim
312 Ditmas Ave., Brooklyn 11218
718-484-1031
(F train to Ditmas Ave., then 3 blocks east)

Café Sim-Sim, Redux (CLOSED)

More visits to Café Sim-Sim--this evening with avid "Tweeters" Gaspsiagore and JoseSPiano--have produced a new favorite kebab and acquaintance with some great dishes hitherto unknown to me.

The moniker "Potato homefries with Chanterelle mushrooms" hardly begins to suggest the refined deliciousness of this dish. Very thinly sliced potatoes, expertly fried, with chanterelles (Лисички) added at the end, somehow become ambrosia. And the Baku-style eggplant salad, an Azeri variation of Russian eggplant caviar, has more tomato than in other versions I've had, producing a somewhat sweet, rich, satisfying dip. Chicken "roulet" (рулет--cold slices of a roll of chicken and some minced vegetables) and meat kutabi (a crepe-like flatbread--the lavash of the lyulya kebabs--filled with minced lamb and folded over into a half-moon), while tasty and everything they should be, pale somewhat in comparison. But be sure to get a loaf of the delicious bread (лепёшка), which they serve warm. Round, with a depression in the middle, it looks a bit like an overgrown bialy.

Chicken "Tabaka" is a whole chicken that has been spatchcocked (yes, I enjoyed using that word, and thank you, Jose, for reminding me of it), then pan-fried and sprinkled with minced garlic. Sublime. And the kebabs continue to impress mightily. My new favorite is the "pork neck" kebab... eating it, it nevers occurs to one that the meat might come from some odd part of the pig: it's simply moist, delicious barbecued pork. The lamb lyulya kebab is just as great as its chicken counterpart. And the beef shish kebab was just as good as it looked at the neighboring table during my first visit. The fries remain spectacular.

[(l. to r.) Lamb lyulya, beef and pork neck kebab pieces, facing a pool of dipping sauce, with sensational fried potatoes discreetly holding up the rear.]

Azeri and Russian cuisines have a lot of dishes that are relatively unfamiliar to most Americans. The menu descriptions are generally pretty good, and the lovely waitress (same one on each occasion so far) will happily answer any remaining questions you may have.

There is one particularly unfortunate and mystifying listing: "Douches". A better transliteration of Дюшес would actually be "Dyushes"... it's a bottled drink flavored with duchess pear.

Café Sim-Sim (CLOSED)

(This restaurant is now, sadly, closed.)

Since the raison d’être of this blog is to spread the word about worthwhile food experiences that people may not know about, this restaurant seems like the perfect way to begin. Of course, “worthwhile” means different things to different people, but for me it means good food (always subjective) at a fair price (somewhat less subjective). Café Sim-Sim passes muster with flying colors. Located in the Kensington neighborhood in Brooklyn, it specializes in Azerbaijani food, which seems to be a cheerful amalgamation of Turkish, Armenian, Persian, and Russian cuisines.

On the basis of the three dishes I tried this evening, this restaurant has catapulted itself to the front rank of my favorite restaurants in NYC. I started with dushbara (дюшбара), a wonderfully satisfying soup of hearty meat dumplings wrapped in delicate dough-skins in a palpably homemade chicken broth seasoned with chopped mint. A little of the accompanying sauce of chopped garlic in red wine vinegar improves it further.

Predictably, kebabs hold center stage in the main dish department. Not so predictable was the first-rate quality of the kebabs—even the accompaniments were stellar. When I was told they would be served with french fries, I thought, “Oh, well… nothing says I have to eat them, and I don’t need the carbs anyway.” But when I was presented with some of the best fried potatoes I have tasted anywhere, all thoughts of leaving even a single fry vanished completely. These fries were obviously whole potatoes very recently, at no point frozen, fried perfectly (well, as perfectly as possible without frying them twice, that is) and sprinkled with some fresh dill. The lamb shish kebab (listed, mysteriously, as “lamb pulp shish kebab”) was top-notch. Chunks of good-quality lamb expertly grilled over charcoal… one could hardly ask for more, and the beef shish kebab at a neighboring table looked every bit as good.

Halfway through my lamb kebab, I realized I couldn’t leave without trying something else, so I ordered another kebab. This one was called “chicken lyulya kebab”. The word lyulya appears several times, unexplained, on the menu—it simply means “ground”. Armed with this information, freshly-imparted by the charming waitress, I was still not prepared for what I received: five juicy, kofta-like flattened meatballs of seasoned chicken, charcoal-grilled on a skewer, then individually wrapped in strips of lavash (Caucasian flatbread, rather like a moo shu pancake) and sprinkled with dried sumac. Stupendous.

Prices are eminently reasonable. Most of the soups and starters are $5-$8, and the kebabs are $7-$9, with fish offerings costing more. Considering the quality of preparation and ingredients, an unbeatable value.

Before my soup was finished I was already plotting my next visit, and I’m determined to try everything on the extensive menu. Whereupon, I will, of course, report back.

Café Sim-Sim
312 Ditmas Ave., Brooklyn 11218
718-484-1031
(F train to Ditmas Ave., then 3 blocks east)