NYC Subway Restaurant Tour, Part III: Kashkar (Brighton Beach)
Yes, out-of-towners, New York City has beaches, and some of them are in Brooklyn. In the pre-covid era I strolled through the neighborhoods of Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach. Revisiting Brighton Beach, rich in restaurants, seemed a good idea for this new phase of my endless Restaurant Tours. That’s it, bottom and center. To the west is Coney Island, its iconic amusement park, and its housing projects. To the west is Manhattan Beach, a quiet enclave of tidy townhouses. It is a lovely place to stroll, but has no restaurant scene, so this is as close to a Tour mention as it will get.
I took the Q train, a speedy express, from Times Square over the Manhattan Bridge to the Brighton Beach station. Rust patterns always catch my eye, morbidly fascinated as I am by the aesthetics of disinvestment and the slow-motion catastrophe of the country’s biggest transit system in decline.
The elevated station glowers over the corner of Brighton Beach Avenue and Coney Island Avenue. I was reminded of my recent trip to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx on the elevated 1 line.
Brighton Beach Avenue is loaded with Russian restaurants (as well as, reputedly, Russian organized crime). Skovorodka catches the eye with its giant bear. I love Russian food and the Bratva wouldn’t deter me from patronizing law-abiding Russian restauranteurs any more than the Italian Mafia would deter me from eating Italian food in the Bronx and Staten Island. So maybe someday I’ll get back to this restaurant’s “Russian and international” cuisine.
But there are also Georgian and Turkish and other sorta kinda related eateries in the area and today I had my heart set on a Uyghur-Uzbek fusion, of which more later. But first, a walk on the beach. Somehow I sensed this guy was a beachgoer as we walked down Coney Island Avenue toward the waterfront, which falls between Jamaica Bay to the east and Gravesend Bay to the west.
We made it, following behind the Fire Dept. vehicle at right. It chugged quietly but, with no disrespect to the FDNY, I was glad to smell the last of its diesel fumes.
Brighton Beach has an interesting mix of folks. Around the time of the Great Depression it acquired the city’s largest population of Holocaust survivors. Looking east along the Riegelmann Boardwalk, that is probably New Jersey at right, in the hazy distance.
The boardwalk is part of the Coney Island Boardwalk and Beach. Plenty of folks were out enjoying it that day. While the hazy skies sapped the pictures of a little drama, they made the sun’s rays less intense.
Looking west toward the neighborhood of Manhattan Beach (which has waterfront but no real beach of its own). Those looming structures at left are the public restrooms.
OMG, was this beach designed expressly for me? I like walking but hate getting sand in my shoes. This was an unexpected and welcome development.
The panorama shot gives a better idea of the feeling of being on this expansive beach, which runs along Brooklyn’s four southernmost neighborhoods. From east to west they are Brighton Beach, West Brighton, Coney Island, and Seagate.
In the 1970s came a second major wave of migrants, this time from the Soviet Union, including Ashkenazi Jews from Russia and the Ukraine — the latter call their neighborhood Little Odessa. I decided to call this shot Food, Folks, and Fun. That was a vintage Mickey D’s slogan from the 1990s.
More Russians and Ukrainians came in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Broad umbrellas and the occasional tent protected beachgoers (including the ex-Soviet locals, my fellow melanin-deprived creatures) from the gentle sun.
While the neighborhood is predominantly white, and the post-Soviet influx continued during the first decade of the 21st century, that was also when people arrived from Central Asia arrived for the first time. They inspired today’s dining theme.
Beachgoers were not the only ones enjoying the day. This park, though open to the public, was actually part of a nearby condo. Local dignitaries were enjoying the shade.
Some Brighton Beach housing is in a traditional New York townhouse style, similar to the two-story houses in Sunset Park, though the porches are more characteristic of what I saw elsewhere in Brighton Beach.
These slightly newer and more uniform structures are more typical of the neighborhood. Note expanded enclosed porch and second-story patio at right. I’ll bet it’s awesome inside. The homeowner went all-out on the landscaping too. Exceptional homes always catch my eye.
The Shore Boulevard Mall overlooks Sheepshead Bay, a rectangle of water that separates the neighborhood called Sheepshead Bay from Manhattan Beach. It is imposingly long. This is actually the short end of it.
The neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay is loaded with subway stops and restaurants, so the Tour will probably return here.
With a major beach in the mix, I had not intended to do a full survey of the neighborhood’s parks, but I couldn’t help noticing the Babi Yar Triangle Playground, a tip of the hat to the area’s Ukrainian residents. Babi Yar was the site of a Nazi massacre that took the lives of an estimated 100,000 Ukrainians.
Kashkar is located well to the east of the Brighton Beach Avenue restaurant district, just a few blocks from the border between Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach. The restaurant combines Uyghur and Uzbek cuisines. The Uyghurs are an ethnic group that originated in the historical Central Asian region of Turkestan (which includes modern-day Turkmenistan and other countries).
Most of the Uyghur people are among the several ethnic groups who live in an autonomous zone in the Xinjiang region of northwest China. As the star and crescent above the doorway suggest, they are a Muslim minority. According to the Human Rights Watch they are subjected to severe persecution.
A little piece of the Uyghur diaspora resides in former Soviet republics including Uzbekistan, which explains why Kashkar flies two food flags, so to speak, representing kindred facets of the same tradition. If you need to check a map — as I did — Uzbekistan is in the top left corner, while China’s Xinjiang region and its Uyghur population are top and center.
I have had Uzbek food twice before, always with pleasure, at Chinar on Staten Island and more recently at Toshkent in Brooklyn. This was my first brush with Uyghur greatness.
The menu is not easy to access on the restaurant’s website, so as a public service, I’m going to reproduce it in full.
Here are the salads and the introduction, which notes that Kashgar (city spelled with a G in the second syllable, restaurant with a K) lies “at the foot of the Great Silk Road.” It is a place where “the traditional way of life, customs and culture of the entire Uyghur people have been preserved for thousands of years. No wonder the locals like to say that ‘all the best in Xin-Jiang is from Kashgar’.” What a privilege to share in their culture, even if we didn’t talk much. My pick was a tomato and onion salad at the top of the left column under salads.
Here are the soups and noodle dishes. Once I found out there was a noodle submenu, I was a goner. I see noodles, I have to have them.
Here are the appetizers, right, and vegetarian selections, left. Note the prevalence of lamb as the favored and most authentic meat option.
More appetizers and kebabs including chicken, beef, and veal along with lamb.
Fish, sides, desserts, beverages. How do you want your fried potatoes: Turkic or American style?
This is Salad Achichuk, featuring bitter peppers, onion, and some of the freshest tomato I’ve ever had. As you’ve seen in my previous work, that always gets my attention.
Don’t worry, the bitter peppers weren’t unduly bitter. They just added a subtle flavor note.
My noodles were Bosu Lagman: fried noodles with lamb and veg. I had just had another form of these noodles at Toshkent, where the menu described them as hand-pulled.
Fried noodles are another thing that gets my attention. This dish had a vaguely Sphinxlike look.
What mysterious blend of Uyghur-Uzbek spices made them so tasty?
I plated the appetizer and noodles together for a unity shot.
The empty-plate shot made me realize that part of the magic of the noodles was in the chili oil, though it was mild, while the magic of the salad may have stemmed from either added tomato juice or just the blood of those scrumptious tomatoes.
Leaving from a different side of the elevated station from where I’d entered, I noticed an elevator with a sign above it in a dressy serif font. When you’re full of noodles, getting a lift to the platform is always a welcome plus! Thank you, MTA. May you get the funding appropriate for the biggest transit system in the greatest city in the world. We keep calling ourselves that. But can we live up to it?
Previously on the NYC Subway Restaurant Tour:
Part I: Lake House Cafe (Van Cortlandt Park)
Part II: Toshkent (Bath Beach)
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