Legend has it that when the 14th Century conqueror Tamerlane went off on his crusades he tried hard to re-create the flat bread of his beloved Samarkand but, alas, to no avail.
Fellow Uzbekistan-native Isak Barayev moved from his Central Asian homeland a decade ago and after several years of experimentation was finally able to do what mighty Tamerlane could not.
“I had the idea to bring lepioshka (the Russian name for Uzbek bread) here when I was still in Uzbekistan,” Barayev says, in between greeting visitors at his New York restaurant and bakery. “And then, when I came here and tried American bread, I was convinced that I needed to make it. American bread has no flavor and it doesn’t fill you up. There is too much air.”
So upon returning from his first visit to the U.S., Barayev began what would be years of bread experimentation.
“I returned to Uzbekistan with American water, flour, yeast and salt,” says the restaurateur, who belongs to a family of famous Uzbek hand drum players. “I wanted to try to make lepioshka (or non in Uzbek) from American products, to see if it could be done. I made two or three tries and finally I reached my aim: to make it taste like bread from the Uzbek bakers.”
Although Uzbek non bears similarities to French baguettes, Italian bread, Middle Eastern pita and South Asian nan, it has a flavor and texture all its own. Crisp, heavy and chewy on the edges, the clay-oven baked loaf has a flattened middle section with tiny holes that make it bake up like a crunchy cracker. Further distinctive flavor comes from black and white sesame seeds sprinkled over the top that taste like nothing found in the United States.
It’s the kind of bread that inspires poems, dreams and deep nostalgia.
And for Barayev it inspired a dream that only grew stronger when he finally immigrated to the United States in 1990. So as he worked jobs in New York as a shoemaker, sausage vendor, dishwasher and limousine driver, he spent his off hours making plans for the bakery he would open one day.
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But re-creating the bread was not as easy as simply matching the ingredients. Barayev ran into a major roadblock when he found that the U.S. did not have the right soil to re-create the kind of clay-and-sheep’s-wool ovens necessary for the baking.
“Next door there is a pottery shop and we showed them an oven from Uzbekistan. The owner told us that she never in her life saw such a beautiful oven, but that she couldn’t make it,” said Barayev’s daughter Angela, who is more comfortable than her father about doing interviews in English.
Not a man to let small obstacles stand in his way, Barayev decided to fly the ovens (called tandirs) into Kennedy airport from Uzbekistan. Instead of using cotton stalks or coal to heat them, he installed gas pipes, but otherwise, they were identical to ovens used by bakers in his home country. And in turn, they produced bread that tasted like it was fresh from the bazaars of Tashkent, a bread that many consider the finest in the world.
On the day he finally opened the doors of Uzbekistan Tandoori Bread–six years after arriving in the country–Barayev celebrated by giving away the bread. Today, he does a brisk business selling the fabulous dinner plate-sized loaves at $1 each. These breads, which are kosher, sell especially well around the Jewish high holidays and just after Passover. And although a some imitators have followed, few have survived.
These days, the Kew Gardens establishment has expanded from one-room storefront to two-room restaurant with an adjacent cultural center. On one of the hottest days of the year, the Barayev family was hard at work serving a healthy lunch crowd in the un-air conditioned eatery. In the kitchen, Uzbek bakers with their hair wrapped in cloth braved even hotter temperatures to stick uncooked loaves onto the walls and ceiling of the torrid clay ovens. Twenty minutes later they used a pole and metal basket to peel 30 golden loaves off the walls.
“Each tandoori oven is heated to 500 degrees,” says Angela. “The (Uzbek bakers) are used to it because they have done it since they were little. Jewish people cannot stand that heat — only Muslims. We have a Muslim kitchen but it is Kosher.”
Although Barayev is not ethnically Uzbek, but a member of the Central Asian Jewish community that has lived in the former Soviet republic for centuries, he has been instrumental in bringing Uzbek culture to the area.
His cultural center hosts concerts and dance performances as well as lectures on Uzbek customs, like the March new year celebration known as navruz. Jewish customs practiced in the bakery include keeping a kosher/halal kitchen, closing for the Sabbath and Passover and destroying and replacing the oven each year after the holiday.
Still, the kosher bread attracts customers of all races and religions. Angela claims that Persians and Puerto Ricans to Arabs and Indians frequent the restaurant, which also happens to be big among taxi and limousine drivers. But the customers Barayev originally had in mind when he conceived the place were Central Asian immigrants nostalgic for a taste of the past.
“My father always had a dream that one day he would open up this kind of tandoori place to make all of those people happy who came from Uzbekistan 30 or 40 years ago,” Angela explains. “Whether they are Uzbeks or Bukharan Jews or Russians, so many people had a dream to taste that bread one more time before they die.”
But the eatery cranks out more than bread. The kitchen also serves several authentic Uzbek dishes that Barayev said he labored hard to perfect. These include a meat danish called a samsa, a handmade noodle soup called laghman, coriander-laced carrot salad, fist-sized raviolis called manti and the national pilaf-like dish of Uzbekistan called plov.
On a Sunday afternoon, Barayev bustled around the restaurant greeting and seating customers, selling bread, attending to business calls and sitting intermittently for an interview. But even in the midst of all this activity, he found time to pick up the saz and sing a few verses of an Uzbek song, “Laila,” with a customer. His saz (a Turkish stringed-instrument) playing is fine, but his real expertise lies in a hand drum called a doira. His father was a legend on the instrument and Barayev continues this tradition on the side by playing bar mitzvahs, weddings and other events with his band called Shalom Aleichum.
Although he gets occasional orders to ship loaves across the country, Barayev’s regular distribution areas are in Brooklyn and Queens. His bakery is also a favorite among those in New Jersey’s sizable Uzbek community, which is now saved the expense of flying bakers in from Uzbekistan for their weddings.
Currently the bakery produces between 900 and 2,000 loaves a day (with the largest volume being made for Friday nights before sundown). But Barayev hopes to increase production next year by adding a new oven to the Kew Gardens operation and even opening branches in Chicago, Las Vegas and Miami.
As with many international business ventures, Barayev has had to wade through a lot of red tape to get his operation running smoothly. Although he says he has never received the promised support of the Uzbek government, his kitchen remains a seemingly peaceful model of inter-ethnic, inter-religious cooperation between Muslim Uzbeks and Central Asian Jews.
“Muslims worked very well with us always without problems,” says Angela. “They are like brothers and sisters with us.”