Strictly Speaking

A few nights ago I was eating dinner in an Uzbeki restaurant in Forest Hills, Queens. Although I standardly do not eat meat other than what comes out of the sea, I’m preparing for a trip to Argentina in January where I won’t be able to resist asado. So anyway, the plan was to re-acclimate to the reddest of the red meats.

One thing I don’t mind admitting to the world is that I have a huge crush on Robert Sietsema. I don’t know anything about him other than what I read in his column, Counter Culture, in the Village Voice. But that man speaks to my soul. My many years in the NYC area are better for his presence. I am at the point where I will follow him into a McDonald’s to eat if he writes about it in that glowing way that is his wont.

Anyway, I always have at the ready a set of small laminated cards with many of his reviews (the condensed versions, taken from the top 100 lists (which also are his wont)) broken down by neighborhood and ethnicity so that I might be prepared under any circumstances to locate dining pleasure. Having spent the day at the Queens College library, I consulted the cards (heh heh) and decided to try Salut. It comes down on the “tahini” side of the tahini/mayonnaise divide which breaks up baba ghanoush space into two parts. But, of course, the draw is the meat. It only took a few lamb cubes in the lagman soup plus one small skewer of kebab for me to reach my meat tolerance point, but it felt well worth it. The dining room is not large, and two large parties took up most of it. Although they did not seem to be connected, arriving as they did at different times, they ended up engaging in an ad hoc singing competition, which was not in English, but which seemed to be based on a kind of composed-on-the-fly sung limerick, but with four instead of five anapestic lines. At the end of every fourth line (generally sung by the oldest man at the table), the rest of the people would burst into laughter in a way that implied the content was somewhat bawdy. Sadly I do not speak Uzbek so I can’t report on this definitively. Yet I can say that lagman is a fine fine soup. Also, barcha odamlar erkin, qadr-qimmat va huquqlarda teng bo’lib tug’iladilar. Ular aql va vijdon sohibidirlar va bir-birlari ila birodarlarcha muomala qilishlari zarur (thanks, wikipedia.org).