Tashkent Supermarket Halal Food

Tashkent Supermarket Opens First Manhattan Location in the West Village | Eater NY

"After years of anticipation — "Since Eater reported the news in 2022," the long-promised Manhattan outpost finally opened in the West Village at 378 Sixth Avenue, and the wait was fertile with backstory: “Having a location in Manhattan has always been a dream of ours,” Misa Khayriddinova, a member of the operations team, told Eater, adding, “We started the process in 2019, but obviously, we ran into some unforeseen complications.” Impatience had even spawned online commentary: one Redditor wrote, “It feels like it’s been there forever, promising to open but never doing so, taunting me every day as I leave and enter the subway on the way to work.” Window cases have already been drawing commuters to ogle pastries like sour-cherry–stuffed blinchik, flaky samsa, and stratified cake slices with delicate alternating layers of honeycomb and whipped cream. Part supermarket, prepared foods palace, and snack emporium, the space funnels shoppers toward an open kitchen where Samarkind-style plov is ladled from large drum-like basins (so large it takes two staffers to lift them) — the plov is strewn with chickpeas and raisins that “pop with juice,” topped with cumin-spiced lamb, beef, or chicken that is fork-tender, and piled atop soft rice kernels sluiced in zigir oil, a critical ingredient in achieving the dish’s taste. The plov station sits between a bakery counter and a made-to-order kebab bar where a cook uses an electric-powered shawarma knife to shave crisped slivers of chicken and lamb into warmed sheets of lavash bread, dodging occasional flares when juices hit the flames. Throughout the day staff are seen weaving through shopping caddies with steaming hot trays perched high above their heads, replenishing empty trays and returning to the commissary kitchen one floor below. That downstairs commissary is as large as the 1,525-square-foot retail floor above and produces pelmeni and varenyky stuffed with potato and crowned with tiny caramelized onions and sprigs of fresh dill; stock pots of both red and green borscht and the Uyghur vegetable noodle soup known as lagman simmer away; softball-sized manti, crimped and filled with pumpkin, spinach, or beef, are arranged on trays and showered in cumin and paprika; and a dizzying selection of salads is prepared, some with pickled or smoked fish and others made entirely of fresh veggies and herbs. The grocery side is robust as well: a meat counter displays cuts including goat ribs sourced from the brand’s own halal, USDA-certified slaughterhouse in New Jersey; adjacent cold cases carry varieties of smoked and cured sausage under the private label Baht; towers of fresh produce sit on central islands; and familiar items like Tate’s organic chocolate chip cookies sit alongside kompot and candies in Russian packaging. The company’s first and largest location opened in 2012 on Coney Island Avenue (27,000 square feet) and its Brighton Beach outpost has been described as a lifeblood of a community often dubbed “Little Odessa,” a neighborhood more recently colored by war but also one that has been spotlighted in films like Anora. In the West Village the operation reads more as a taste of discovery — suited for a Washington Square Park lunch or an easy $10 student meal — and it is open daily from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m.; the breakfast rotation of hot-bar items, including “syrniki, the stout, coin-like quark pancakes stuffed with various fillings,” appears around 9 a.m. and gives way to lunch items around noon." - Nat Belkov