New York Press
By José Ralat Maldonado

This Uyghur restaurant is a small room with an open kitchen in the rear that has a wall-mounted TV showing Central Asian pop stars in Hawaiian shirts breaking down beats with the requisite half-naked dancing girls.

The café’s clientele is mainly made up of the Russian and Ukrainians who populate Brighton Beach. The food derives from the Central Asian Turkic people, many of whom live in the Xianjiang province of China, related to Kyrgyz, Kazakhs and Tajiks in language, culture and cuisine: kabobs, noodles and lamb, lamb and more lamb. The menu lists items in Cyrillic and English. No one at Café Kashkar really speaks English. That made ordering as greasy and heavy as the food. The server recommended geiro lagman ($6), made-to-order noodles with chunks of meat, fennel, peppers, green beans, broccoli and parsley. Mildly spicy, it’s an oleaginous treat that was the standout winner of our meal. Start out with the lamb-filled samsa (think samosa, $2), which are flaky with a sweet onion aftertaste. Among the eight kebab options, the lamb and chicken (both $3) are juicy, crispy bites that left us begging for more. The tomato-base sauce that our server called just kebab sauce wasn’t needed. The rice pilaf ($6) came with julienne carrots, chickpeas and, of course, meat, though my dining companions and I couldn’t identify what kind. Stay away from the naan ($2); it’s not like the Indian bread but rather a dense, oversized hockey puck of a loaf. And bring along some Baltika, a Russian beer sold in the markets on Brighton Beach Avenue, to wash down the unctuous goodness.

Café Kashkar, 1141 Brighton Beach Ave. (betwn. 14th & 15th Sts.), Brooklyn, 718-743-7832.