Experimenting with Uzbekistani Food in Honor of Our Men and Women in Uniform

I wonder what our men and women in uniform are having for dinner over in Uzbekistan. Personally, I would be excited to travel overseas to a faraway land, to defend America against a sly and mysterious enemy, if only to be able to eat with the locals. My fellow Navy boys may cruise the streets of Tashkent looking for traditional sailor snacks, like booze and hookers. Others may savor Dinty Moore stew right from the can, or sit down to a traditional Army meal of shit-on-a-shingle, a tantalizing combination of reconstituted chipped beef and cream sauce served on toast. But at least a few military food mavens will (if permitted) seek out some of the wonderful Uzbekistani food that I've found duplicated on side streets off of Queens Blvd. here at home.

Queens Blvd. They don't call it "Boulevard of Death" for nothing. Consider yourself lucky if you don't spot a man or woman with a cane every 10 feet along my favorite stretch of Queens Blvd.?the part beginning at the Queens Center Mall and running through Kew Gardens. Ambulances fly by every minute or so, en route to one of those hideous, terraced apartment buildings to collect ailing great-grandparents for the last time. Surgical supply stores and MRI palaces line Death's boulevard, inexplicably located alongside New York's largest collection of strip clubs and hourly motels.

Since the anthrax scare, I'm a nervous wreck. I don't ride the subway anymore. I ride the Q60 bus; me and 40 other 80-year-old babushkas with canes and walkers. It's great fun. On one particular ride, four wheelchair-bound customers attempted to board the bus at 63rd Dr. Yet another attempted to board at 63rd Rd. I got off at 65th Lane, and on my way over to 99th St., took a brisk walk through the silent, crescent-shaped streets of Rego Park. Those of you without unrealistic notions of danger and fear can take the G or R train to 67th Ave.

You might recognize the neighborhood as home to George Costanza's parents on the Seinfeld show. It's the kind of urban/suburban hybrid area well suited for trick-or-treating, except I imagine that the prevailing treats here would be pennies and boxes of raisins. Also, you might assume that there was nothing good to eat around here. Well, there's an Outback Steakhouse, a Red Lobster and a Sizzler, but this is still Queens?there's always good stuff around the corner.

My elder friends on the Q60 bus speak with Russian-Jewish accents, and the Cyrillic lettering on the storefronts confirms the presence of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, primarily from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. At the aptly named Registan (Rego Park + istan), a neighborhood kosher Uzbekistani restaurant, you are greeted not by a maitre d' but by a sink. In the entryway. Maybe it is customary in Central Asia to wash one's hands before eating?I've read that dysentery is standard fare at restaurants in Uzbekistan. Inside, the atmosphere is a little on the sad side, and the decor consists of travel posters of Uzbekistan, a few handcrafted vases and platters, six cheap crystal chandeliers and long poker tables covered with fancy linens and Far Eastern-style china. You do not go to Rego Park for the ambience.

Uzbek cuisine is a Middle Eastern/Russian hybrid, similar to Turkish and Armenian. There are kebabs, and, unlike Turkish food, you are more or less compelled to order them. The good news is that Uzbek chefs are the true Kebab Kings, despite the fact that countless Indo/Pak spots around town lay claim to the kebab throne.

There's something primal about Kebabery, in that after man invented knives and fire, it was possible to eat grilled meat on a stick. From satays to churrascos to (and this is perhaps stretching it) corn dogs, meat on a stick is found on every continent and perhaps every culture on Earth.

Uzbekistan-style kebabs are small, and priced accordingly, so order two of them per diner. If you're hungry, you can always order more. Start with the chicken breast kebab, which miraculously tastes like chicken. There are three types of lamb; the fat-free with bone is the best option. I also sampled the fatty version, which was tastier, but was too fatty even for me, who's not usually the Jack Sprat type. More adventurous and more delicious is the liver kebab, which was properly salty, juicy and snappy in texture?right up there with the calf's liver alla Veneziana at al di la in Park Slope.

Balancing out the menu are relatively unremarkable soups, salads and fried foods. The carrot salad, a staple of Uzbek cuisine, was not as garlicky as others I've tried, though it had a little fire to it, probably from the juice of pickled cherry peppers. The bright, mild cherry peppers also made an appearance in the shurpa, a vaguely Jewish-style vegetable soup topped with fresh dill and containing a dense rectangular chunk of beef. Fried tortellini was like the hors d'oeuvres encountered at wedding cocktail hours at Leonard's of Great Neck.

Altogether, you'll spend about 10 to 15 dollars per person on soup, shared salads and kebabs. You'll need tea in order to fit in. They have several loose-leafed varieties, including a smoky green tea and a mild Earl Grey. There's no dessert on the menu, but Jewish bakeries abound nearby on Queens Blvd. If you arrive too late, though, they'll run out of chocolate babkas.

Registan, 65-37 99th St. (65th Ave.), Queens, 718-459-1638.

Uzbekistan Tandoori Bread

I was reluctantly going to a party out in Islip, Long Island, where I would be entertained by a spunky combo of low-level employees of Computer Associates, Inc. and psychology masters students from SUNY Stony Brook. Only by the grace of God would I be able to get myself out of this one.

Turns out the Almighty was on my side that night. My Long Island Railroad train was idling at Jamaica station when the conductor announced that a "situation" had come up and they had to take the train out of service. They locked us in while the police rushed the next car to remove a mentally questionable man from the train. Now, ordinarily I would calmly get off the train and then curse, mumble and kick garbage cans for as long as it would take for a new train to whisk us away. But this is 2001, and given the current situation with anthrax, the 100 percent chance of future attacks and rampant societal paranoia (not to mention my own personal paranoia), I bolted out of the station and down into the forbidden zone of Sutphin Blvd., which to a sheltered Long Islander would be considered more dangerous than opening a greasy package postmarked from Malaysia.

Luckily, I know my way around Queens. Five minutes by bus would land me in bucolic Kew Gardens, where I would recover from my traumatic experience amidst stately Tudor-style homes, leafy narrow streets filled with that autumnal fireplace smell and the consoling, familiar faces and aromas of Jewish grandparents.

After a 7:30 showing of Dinner Rush, I was ready to chow down. A block down Lefferts Blvd. I saw the glow of a party in progress and heard the distant wails of a gypsy troubadour; there was dancing, and music, and food. It was an Uzbekistani restaurant, and coincidentally I was in the process of reviewing another such restaurant down the road. This would be an excellent opportunity to learn more about the cuisine, and to be swept into a strange, distant world for an hour or so, before having to emerge back into the one that we're currently forced to live in.

While the atmosphere at Registan was that of death and sadness, this place, Uzbekistan Tandoori Bread, was jumping. It was Friday night, and an adorable older man with a mustache and an afro was serenading a packed house. I stood there until the song was over, and then he sat me at the back of the restaurant at the only open table, which I would share with an adding machine and harried waitstaff. Across from me at another table for one was an Anglo flight attendant dining solo (Kew Gardens is full of them, being halfway between JFK and La Guardia). I thought this would be an amazing "That's how we met" story: two lonely souls adrift in central Queens at an Uzbekistani restaurant.

The food at Uzbekistan Tandoori Bread is quite good. Aside from the kebabs, which were adequate but not as exciting as those at Registan, everything else I had was terrific. Two outstanding dishes were the lagman, a homemade noodle soup with beef, and the plov, or beef over rice, which is the national dish of Uzbekistan. The soup was extremely rich, a little spicy and full of small, tender pieces of meat and thick, chewy white noodles. Bringing it into the realm of gourmet eating is a healthy sprinkling of fresh tarragon. (You know, they drink tarragon soda in some former Soviet republics; it's available here in grocery stores along Queens Blvd., as well as in Brighton Beach.)

The rice dish is made from long- and short-grain rice sauteed with Eastern spices (I detected fennel seeds, cumin and cardamom), shredded carrots and a few currants. It is wonderful, intensely flavored and aromatic, and has an interesting chewy consistency almost like a risotto. The beef thrown on top looks dry, but is instead, perhaps, aged. I can't describe it very well, but it's good and it goes well with the rice.

Salads were acceptable; their carrot salad being more garlicky but less spicy than that of Registan, and the pickled tomatoes and cucumbers a nice balance to the hearty meat-based entrees. Bread and tea are requirements here; order a loaf of pide and you'll be served the largest bagel in Queens County. The green tea is a deep, smoky Russian (the black tea is a pathetic bag of Krasdale purchased at a 99-cent store).

The menu is in English, and from what I saw (and smelled) of other patrons' meals, everything looked great, especially the meat pastries. I was sitting next to the hectic kitchen, a well-oiled machine that will not buckle under the pressure of a packed restaurant. To get there, take the E or F train to Union Turnpike, and follow Kew Gardens Rd. to Lefferts Blvd. The staff at Uzbekistan Tandoori Bread is friendly, the ambience charming and exotic, and the food different and exciting. You'll return home full and satisfied, possibly with the companionship of a lonely flight attendant.

Uzbekistan Tandoori Bread, 120-35 83rd Ave. (Lefferts Blvd.), Queens, 718-850-3426.