The city we are named after
Samarkand is one of the oldest cities in Central Asia, and for most of its life it was a place people passed through on the way to somewhere else. That turned out to matter enormously for the food.
It sat on the Silk Road, which was never one road. It was a web of routes carrying silk and paper east to west, spices and glass and horses in every other direction, and with them the people who cooked. Caravans stopped in Samarkand because it had water, walls and markets. They stayed a few days. They ate.
A kitchen built by everyone who came through
When a city is a crossroads for two thousand years, its cooking stops belonging to any single tradition.
From Persia came the habit of cooking rice with meat and fat in one pot until the grains take on everything around them. That is plov, and its relatives run all the way west to Spanish paella and east to Indian biryani.
From China came the noodle, pulled by hand rather than cut. That is lagman, and the family resemblance to Chinese hand-pulled noodles is not an accident.
From the Turkic steppe came the fire. Meat threaded onto a skewer and cooked fast over coals is nomad cooking, portable and quick, and it became shashlik.
From the tandyr oven, which spread across the whole region, came the bread and the samsa, traditionally baked by slapping dough against a hot clay wall.
None of these arrived as a finished dish. Each one landed, got made with local lamb and local carrots and the spices that were already on the shelf, and turned into something Uzbek.
The blue city
In 1370 Timur made Samarkand the capital of his empire and set about building something people would travel to see rather than through. He brought in craftsmen from everywhere he had conquered, and they covered the city in glazed tile in a particular deep turquoise blue.
The Registan, three enormous tiled schools facing each other across a public square, is what most people picture when they picture Samarkand. His grandson Ulugh Beg built an observatory there and measured the length of the year to within a minute of what we now know it to be.
So the name carries two things at once: a market town where everyone stopped to eat, and a city that decided to be beautiful.
Why the name is on a door in Mill Basin
We are a long way from the Registan. Strickland Avenue is not a Silk Road caravan stop.
But the food we cook came out of that crossroads, and it works the same way here as it did there. A plate of plov in the middle of a table with everyone reaching in. Bread torn by hand rather than cut. Skewers coming off the fire in rounds while people are still talking. It is food built for a room full of people who did not all arrive together.
That is why we took the name, and it is what we are trying to put on the table.
Come and eat
Samarkand Nights, 6001 Strickland Avenue, Mill Basin, Brooklyn. Everything is halal. Closed Mondays. Tuesday to Thursday we are open 12:00 PM to 10:00 PM, and Friday to Sunday 11:30 AM to 10:30 PM. Call (718) 650-7600.
