Restaurant Review: The Cross-Cultural Cuisine of Nargis Bar & Grill | 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, flecked with carrot, chickpeas, scallions, and fatty scraps of lamb, felt like a cousin of fried rice. The breads impressed too — non, a fluffy, chewy, sesame-topped round loaf with a depressed center that looked like a gigantic bialy, and the crisp, concave non-toki that resembled a sheet of matzo — “but better!” the chef and owner, Boris Bangiev, declared as he worked the room. The décor mixes Uzbek textiles and ceramics with exposed brick, distressed tables, and tin ceilings, and the menu is almost exactly the same as the original. A mixed appetizer platter includes hummus and baba ghanoush alongside kimchi and a curled tangle of “Korean style carrot salad with cumin” (a reminder that Soviet Koreans were deported to Uzbekistan in the 1930s). Samsa are tricornered, crunchy, flaky packages, and delicate-skinned manti come filled with barely sweetened minced pumpkin or a beef-and-lamb mixture. Bangiev has gained some fame for cooking skewers of cubed lamb or chicken hearts over embers kept glowing with the aid of drugstore hair dryers; they arrive with raw onion, sumac, and a chunky, complex tomato-based condiment whose ingredients he says number fifty. What I’m still thinking about is the Tashkent salad: a cold, creamy mix of chopped egg and chewy matchsticks of beef tongue, balanced by bitter white radish, scallion, and dill, and topped with a pile of golden fried onions — named for Bangiev’s home city, which he hasn’t returned to in twenty-six years. Dishes range from $3 to $25." - Hannah Goldfield