Uzbek cuisine in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn

As I rode my bike through Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, I noticed many pre-war residential buildings, and small businesses including antique shops, laundromats, accounting services, and restaurants. There is a diverse selection of ethnic restaurants serving a wide array of foods from Japanese omakase to Italian Sicilian pizza. With many of these tempting options in my periphery, I pedaled down Sheepshead Bay Rd, turned on Avenue X, and stopped in front of the storefront with a brightly lit LED display spelling out Foteh’s Tandoori. Located on a relatively busy two-way street, this Uzbeki restaurant is hard to miss.

I was curious about the meaning of the restaurant's full name, Foteh's Tandoori Cafe Chayhana, and directed the question to the Uzbekistan manager. They told me a tandoor is a traditional clay oven used for baking samsas and steered our attention to the tandoor in the restaurant’s open kitchen. From my research, I found out that Foteh is an Uzbek family name that means conqueror or winner. Lastly, with my limited knowledge of Russian, I know that чайхана has the word чай, which means tea.

If a passerby looked through Foteh’s Tandoori's windows, they can expect to see children, mothers, students, and construction workers enjoying the delicious Uzbeki food inside the well-lit store. Since we visited on a Thursday evening, the space was void of loudness except for quiet chatter among the customers and restaurant workers prepping for the next day. The interior is just as inviting as the outside: the walls are graced with colorful Uzbek ceramic plates picturing domed mosques and mosaic-esque patterns. The atmosphere was brimming with positive energy; the manager greeted us with a hello and gestured for us to sit at an empty table.

Based on recommendations from my Central Asian Film and Food course (and Google reviews), I decided to try the manti, a vegetable-filled samsa, and a pumpkin-filled samsa. My friend ordered the beef samsa and the national food of Uzbek, plov. Before this, I’d never tried Central Asian cuisine so everything was wonderfully new as I started with my vegetarian samsa dipped in the red sauce and finished with the generously-filled beef manteh doused in the white sauce. With our dishes, we were given two dipping sauces: the samsa’s red sauce is made of tomato, while the manti’s white sauce has bases of sour cream yogurt.

As I devoured my vegetable-filled samsa, I noted hints of cumin and black pepper. These spices are ubiquitous in Central Asian cuisine, especially in Uzbekistan. While samsas are eaten as side dishes or snacks in Central Asia, the cooks at Foteh's Tandoori whip up large portions that would fill some people up for lunch and dinner. For me and my friend, we were just getting started with the first round of our samsas.

---

Samsa is a pastry with origins in the Middle East but can be found in Central Asia, India, and Africa– all thanks to centuries of trade on the deceitfully-named, Silk Road. When you hear “Silk Road”, you’d imagine it was filled with smooth roads and riches. But that was not the case- many travelers and traders on the Silk Road were challenged by unpaved roads and the harsh ecology of the desert and mountains. Despite the obstacles, commodities, ideas, crafts, and culture were exchanged among groups of people. This vast network of trade contributed to the multifaceted nature of spices, herbs, cuisines, and how different groups of people put their spin on them.

Cultural derivations of samsas include the South Asian samosas; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Xinjiang have their regional versions of samsas. Likewise, these buttery and flaky treats can be filled with a variety of flavorful meats, dairy, and vegetables from beef to pumpkin.

Flaky vegetable-filled samsa

Huge dish of beef manteh

In the manteh, as I had with the samsa, I tasted the flavor profiles of cumin and black pepper mixed with the pork and onion filling. Despite my weekly encounters with my family’s Chinese dumplings, the manteh have very distinct flavor undertones, unlike any other dumplings I’ve tasted. The white yogurt sauce gave an extra zing of flavor to my manteh experience. What’s more, the combination of the crispness of the green onions, the richness of the meat filling, and the softness of the dumpling shell made it a truly delightful experience.

---

Most cultures have their gastronomic versions of dumplings: the Chinese have xiao long bao’s; the Japanese have gyoza; Eastern Europeans have pierogis, and Central Asians have manteh. In a nutshell, this dish is made by filling dumpling wrappers with seasoned vegetables or meat and pinching the sides closed. As easy as these directions sound, it takes years of skill and dexterity to make hundreds of dumplings for festival celebrations.

Reminiscing on their home and ancestral roots, older generations of Uzbeki migrants indulge in restaurants such as Foteh's Tandoori. Ethnic restaurants such as these exist as a beacon of resilience and hard work. The cooks and servers continue their centuries-old traditions for all generations. These restaurants in Brooklyn and other diasporas keep generations of Central Asians– young and old– tethered to their heritage and bring flavors of home.

My friend in front of the plov