Straight Outta Tashkent

Sometimes the Uzbekistan Restaurant seems less a restaurant than a movie about a restaurant, some New-Wave French flick set in a room with wild, onion-dome cutouts and minarets, Uzbeki hats on the walls, a dome of trompe-l’oeil sky overhead, “1001 Nights” murals and gleaming teapots: It’s a sort of Disneyland-like essay on the joys of post-Soviet capitalism. Uzbekistan Restaurant, run by the man who opened the first privately run restaurant in Tashkent, the Uzbeki capital, is a fairly swanky hang.

Some nights, the women, Ivana-wannabes, seem all but lifted from a Julie Christie movie circa 1967, beehives, clingy dresses and all; at other times, there’s more Chanel and Moschino here than the mind can comprehend. The men slouch in outfits so 1973-cool it’s a wonder they don’t moonlight in Beastie Boys videos. It’s kind of a blast here on weekends, with the restaurant filled up with parties of 15, loud toasts every 12 seconds and an organist pounding out Slav-style Jamaican ballads. (Bad reggae may be the universal language.) Every two weeks or so, an actual Uzbek may show up for dinner amid all the Russians.

Out come the giant platters of kebabs, the mounds of herb-marinated tomato-onion salad, the slabs of house-smoked salmon, the peculiar but chewy and delicious Uzbeki bread that is shaped like a giant bialy and flecked with black seeds. Everybody seems to get platesful of the flaky, meat-filled pastries called samsa , a near cousin to the stuffed breads of northernmost China, and chuchvara , tiny fried dumplings with tomato sauce that bear more than a passing resemblance--though surely no kinship--to St. Louis toasted ravioli. Like the population of Uzbekistan itself, the food here, heavy on vegetables, intricately flavored with spices and fresh herbs, seems two parts Central Asian exotic to one part Russian suave.

Eggplant Samarkand is the sort of cold sauteed eggplant in tomato sauce you have probably eaten at a dozen Middle Eastern restaurants; a Russian pickled vegetable plate includes tart, powerfully garlicky pickled red tomatoes in addition to the usual cabbage and kosher-style dills. Vegetables “Buhara”--tomatoes and onions and peppers and eggplant--are roasted almost to a puree and served in a small tureen. It is hard to imagine a meal at Uzbekistan Restaurant without an order of hasip , pungent, crisp-skinned sausages stuffed with rice and ground organ meat.

“Do you know what is in hasip ?” the owner asked, after the third time I had ordered it.

“Sure,” I said, suddenly uneasy. “It’s probably liver, right?”

“No, ho, ho !” he said, and he held his stomach as if to contain his mirth. “Not liver . . . spleen .”

I ordered it the next time anyway.

When you are not in the mood for spleen, there are always chanum , floppy open-faced Uzbeki ravioli filled with a meat-tinged potato puree and served with sauteed vegetables and an almost hallucinogenic blast of fresh dill. Or lamb chops. Or a strangely charred stir-fry of peppers and mushrooms served in a smoking-hot cast-iron pan. Lagman , lumpy hand-pulled noodles, are served either in a thick meat broth or fried with vegetables and bits of lamb, nearly as soft as a Central European noodle but with a bit of Asian stretchiness.

Plov , the grandfather of all rice pilafs, is dense and slightly oily, more like fried rice than the pilaf you may be familiar with, spiked with diced vegetables and crisp-edged chunks of lamb, flavored with a peculiar sort of Uzbeki cumin seed that is halfway between cumin and caraway. Don’t miss the plov .

Before going out for dinner in Uzbekistan itself, I am reliably informed, it is customary to eat first--the restaurant tradition of the former Soviet republic is not as far along as one might hope. But this place . . . of all the Russian restaurants in Los Angeles, with all the newly arrived emigrees, is easily the equal of the Georgian restaurants in New York’s Brighton Beach. It’s the best former-Soviet-republic food in town.

* Uzbekistan Restaurant

7077 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 464-3663. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Guarded lot parking. No alcohol. Delivery with $30 minimum order. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $22-$30.