This NYT story talks about the Bukharians, one of the most isolated Jewish communities in the world, and how upheaval in Central Asia has brought them -- and their unique cuisine -- to New York. Great read!

An excerpt:

SUNDAY is family night out in Rego Park, Queens. All 10 tables at Restaurant Salute are crowded with pots of green tea, platters of golden French fries showered with chopped garlic and parsley, and piles of Uzbek plov, a cumin-scented pilaf of rice, carrots and chickpeas.

In the kitchen at Shalom, lamb rib kebabs sizzle over a live charcoal fire, helped along by a hair dryer slung near the grill that blasts up flames to sear the meat; the cook, Tolik, spins a piece of dough into one unthinkably long noodle, his arms a blur as he stretches it round and round like string for a huge game of cat's cradle.

At 10 p.m. waitresses at Cheburechnaya are still running between the kitchen and the dining room. Snatches of Russian, Hebrew, Uzbek, Farsi and Tajik can be heard, and babies are passed from lap to lap, bottles of Smirnoff from table to table.

"I have been making chebureks since I was 14 years old," said Isak Sionov, an owner of the restaurant, referring to the savory deep-fried pies that are its signature. "First in the Soviet Union, then in Uzbekistan, then in Israel, and now in Rego Park."

In Queens's Central Asian restaurants, you can read history in the tea leaves.

The geopolitical upheavals of the 20th century sent tens of thousands of people to New York from the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as Afghanistan and western China. Separated from Russia by the vast Kazakhstan steppe, straddled by mountains that stretch from Afghanistan's Hindu Kush, all the way to China and the Himalayas, the region is home to the Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Tashkent, Dushanbe and Bukhara.

Its mountains cross national boundaries, and so do its dishes. Fresh noodles and lamb kebabs, cilantro and garlic sauces and spiced rice pilafs are home cooking for many of these new New Yorkers.

For more than 2,000 years, Central Asia was home to the Bukharians, one of the most isolated Jewish communities in the world, who evolved a unique language, blending Farsi and Hebrew, that scholars call Judeo-Persian and locals call Bukhori. According to the Research Institute for New Americans, about 40,000 Bukharian Jews have settled in New York since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Bukharians established a thriving commercial strip along 108th Street in Rego Park, now called Bukharian Broadway, and opened several kosher restaurants that serve their traditional cooking, based on charcoal, lamb, rice, beets, potatoes, carrots and spices like cumin, paprika and chili.

Reflecting the influence of silk and spice trades, there are tastes of China and India everywhere. Every Bukharian menu offers a garlicky, chili-spiked Korean carrot salad, morkovcha koreyska, that is a legacy of Stalin's mass deportations of ethnic Koreans from the far eastern Soviet Union to its western frontiers. At Tandoori Bukharian Bakery in Rego Park, a samsa - one of Asia's many cousins of the Indian samosa - is deliciously spiked with cumin and baked against the walls of a clay-lined oven that Bukharians, like Indians, call a tandoor.

It is all a long way from bagels and lox.