Buttermilk Graffiti

by Edward Lee

  For all the tasty discoveries of Russian food, though, nothing could have prepared me for my awakening at Kashkar. As I walk through the streets of Brighton Beach, I’m startled by how many Asian people I see: straight black hair, dark narrow eyes, olive skin on Mongoloid faces similar to mine, but speaking Russian, and acting Russian. One forgets how far and pervasive was the reach of the Soviet Empire. It engulfed many cultures across a span of geography that covered half of Europe and all of Asia. Russian is the common language here, but it is spoken by people who may look Chinese or distantly Arabic or as Nordic as Vikings. They are all Russian here in Brighton Beach. As the customers start filing into Kashkar, I notice that they’re speaking both Russian and an unfamiliar language I later find out is Uzbek.

  In English, I order the Samsa Parmuda, which is like the best White Castle slider. It is a feathery layered dough stuffed with lamb, onion, tomato, and peppers. I could survive on only this for about a year before getting bored. Then I order something called Korean Cabbage Salad, which, to my surprise, is a bowl of kimchi. There is not a trace of irony or hipster cuisine in here—this is literally a bowl of red napa kimchi staring me in the face. Next, I order Kovurga Say, a fried lamb rib dish with tomatoes, garlic, peppers, soy sauce, and cheese, another hybrid dish that feels Middle Eastern but tastes more like something from an Asian pantry.

  Finally, I order the café’s Lagman Soup. It has broad flour noodles in a rich meat broth with garlic, red bell pepper, celery, tomatoes, cabbage, and long beans. When it arrives, I get a strong star anise aroma wafting from the bowl. The vegetables float in a dark, impenetrable broth. The noodles are tight and glistening. The first spoonful hits me as something wrong. I don’t like it—not because it isn’t delicious, but because my mind can’t reconcile the flavors. After a few more bites, I realize that this is not pork or chicken broth, but lamb. Noodles in lamb broth—a combination I’ve never tasted before. The aggressive flavor of wet earth and blood paralyzes me. The broth from a typical Chinese cook is viscous but masked with spices and medicine. His hands work fast and light, like that of a piano player, and you can taste that fast work in his broth. This broth, however, is heavy and slow. There is more than just lamb in here. I can taste the ancient cutting board, the hammered tin pot, the heat, the bleating animal, the veined, arthritic hands of a cook moving with pain and tension.

  This dish rocks my world. That simple change, that one cultural difference, makes this noodle bowl into a dish I can’t quite explain. I’ve never thought to replace the pork broth in my noodles with lamb broth. As I sit here over this steaming bowl, I realize I have to relearn everything. My instincts tell me that this combination is incorrect, that the gaminess of the broth does not work with the texture of the noodles, the soft cabbage, and the bite of the long beans. And stewed tomatoes? What are they even doing here? I grew up having noodles in pork or beef broth, and that arrangement was so heavily ingrained in me that I cannot think about noodles in any other broth. With other cuisines that are not a part of my DNA, I feel free to roam around the traditions and experiment. But for some reason, I have a mental seizure when it comes to noodles. To like this dish makes me feel as if I am betraying some part of my childhood. And what if this bowl is good? Not just good, but really good? What if it is better than anything I had as a kid growing up?

  After that first spoonful, the next thing I do is push aside the connection of lamb to Middle Eastern flavors. I repress any inclinations to want yogurt or cumin or unleavened bread. I have to taste lamb as something new. I have to understand that descriptors such as gamy are not accurate. Lamb can taste gamy to someone who has not grown up with it. I take a few more sips of the broth and try to isolate the flavor of the lamb. It is the taste of a wet forest, it is a perfume made from mushroom stems (not the caps, just the stems), it is creamy and tangy, it is a flavor that starts in the nostrils and slides down like heavy rain. The broth is strengthened by garlic, cloves, cumin, and star anise. The spices are harmonious in a way that never felt congruous in a duck or chicken dish. It hits me that the origin of Chinese five-spice powder is here, in this remote cuisine that straddles the worlds of the Far East and the Levant. The spices and the broth coat the weighty noodles in a thin but pungent film. In a small glass jar on the table is a side condiment of vinegar marinating in ginger, peppers, and spices. I sprinkle a few dashes of it into the soup, and the meal becomes perfect.

  At the end of dinner, I sit down with the owner’s son, Danik, and a patron acting as interpreter, and we talk through our broken languages. His father, Yousef, Danik says, has been a cook his whole life. In 1961, he left China and settled in Uzbekistan, where he opened a restaurant. When his restaurant there failed, about fourteen years ago, he moved to Brighton Beach. He knew people who had come over and that there was a foundation community of Russians who were friendly to any Russian-speaking people. The same tensions that existed over rival cultures in the Soviet Union did not exist in Brooklyn. It was like the best of Russia, with the mob but not the KGB. I ask Danik where the rest of his people are. Some live in D.C. and Virginia, but as far as he knows, this is the only Uyghur restaurant in America. I ask if this is Russian food. He shrugs, as if to say, What is Russian food? Yousef is reading a newspaper this whole time and barely looks up when I ask this question. He gives his son a look, and everyone gets up to go back to work. Yousef smiles gently at me, as if to tell me good night.

  I walk out into the evening with more questions than answers. Why did this soup have such a gut-wrenching effect on me? Who are the people who yearn for this food? Why can’t I get drunk in the middle of Brighton Beach? I am told to go to the boardwalk. The cafés there have plenty of vodka and lively Russian entertainment, and they look out over the beach. I walk toward the sound of the ocean. The sky is dark, and the streets are quieter and emptier now. I pass by women in hooded parkas pushing strollers of crying babies as they return home from an evening walk. I get to the boardwalk; it is still jumping with people. Kids screech and zigzag along the wooden planks of the walkway. Girls giggle into their cell phones under dim streetlamps. An old woman pushing a metal cart sells umbrellas on a cold but otherwise clear evening. I don’t go near the beach, but I can feel the grit of sand beneath my shoes. It makes my soles roll along the surface of the boardwalk. I can’t tell you exactly how many grains there are, but I can tell you exactly whom I had a crush on in the third grade and who bullied me and made me cry. I can tell you exactly what time of day it was when we packed all our stuff into a moving van and unceremoniously hurried out of Canarsie for the last time, no one in my family but me looking back to wave good-bye to our neighborhood.

  There’s a festive crowd at Tatiana’s, so I settle myself on a patio chair made out of green plastic. I get vodka on ice and gaze out onto the boardwalk. I can’t see the ocean anymore, but I can smell it. I can hear the waves drowning out the laughter of the old men sitting nearby. I try to strike up a conversation with the waitress, but she doesn’t say much. I ask her a bunch of personal questions that are probably dumb and intrusive. I order another vodka, and this time a different waitress brings it out to me. She slams the glass down on the table and immediately turns her back to me. I turn toward an older couple; they are willing to talk to me. Boris and Ludmila—he is from Siberia, a poet and a musician; she is a professor of Russian literature. They are both affable and gray-haired and slightly drunk. I question them about Russia, and Boris is quick to tell me he is Siberian, not Russian. He paints a picture of an untouched, isolated home blanketed in snow—according to him, the most beautiful place on earth. I say I want to visit, though I doubt I will ever even try. I buy them a round of drinks, and he sings me a song from his native town. Vodka is a lovely and terrible thing. I don’t know if it was responsible for the demise of the Soviet Empire, but it can’t have helped. After a few more shots and a mediocre plate of chicken Kiev, I end up at a bar called the Velvet Rope. The waitress from Tatiana’s told me to go there,
most likely in the hope that I would leave her section.

  Any place called the Velvet Rope promises to be a hard-core, thumping nightclub, but when I walk in, there are only two elderly Russian men sitting on patio chairs, asleep, mouths agape. Slow night. I order a vodka and soda, and talk to a woman next to me who could be a supermodel. She answers all my questions with one-word answers until I get the hint. At the other end of the bar is a well-groomed man in a tight leather jacket smoking a hookah with two beautiful women. The women are dressed in what I can only describe as throwback 1980s glam glitter with a hint of prostitute extravagance. On anyone else, the look would be tawdry, but on them, it’s classy. He, on the other hand, is Baryshnikov meets Wolverine. I buy them a drink, and we talk for a bit. Just small talk. The music is getting too loud for us to have a thoughtful conversation. There is karaoke here. There is karaoke everywhere. Smoke and vodka and a cheap microphone. The old men start singing ballads, loud and sad. Someone asks me if I want to sing Sinatra, and I decline. One of the pretty girls gets up to the mic and sings a hard-nosed semi-punk song in Russian. I ask my new friend at the bar to translate, and he starts gesticulating wildly. I can’t hear all the words, but I think the lyrics go like this:

  She hides her jewelry in her purse

  Past the boys on the boulevard, but I’ve seen worse

  Hanging out in the bathroom of Rasputin Inn

  It’s amazing how a little bill can buy you so much sin

  There was a note by the pillow in the script of a child

  It was left unfinished but what it said was pretty wild

  It said, we are girls and boys for sale

  Girls and boys for sale

  You might think that we’re angels

  But you never can tell

  ’Cause we are girls and boys for sale

  The rest of the song gets lost in the noise of the bar, but the refrain stays in my head while I order another vodka and soda. What I get instead is a shot of vodka pulled from the freezer. I don’t shoot it in one gulp. I sip it like tea, which makes the bartender look at me suspiciously. The music is getting louder, and the vodka is impairing my hearing. I try to talk, but my voice becomes as thin as the smoke from the hookah pipes. The guy sitting next to me loses interest in what I’m trying to say. Truth be told, I’ve lost my train of thought, too.

  It is late when I leave the bar. I don’t say good-bye, just slip out clumsily. I don’t know what time it is, but the streets are quiet. Everything is bathed in the soft yellow light of the streetlamps. A train erupts overhead, and for a moment, a few people emerge from the subway platform and skitter away. My eyes are blurry. This street looks like the place where I grew up: elevated subway cars, colorless brick buildings. I get into a cab and ask the driver to drive around until I can find a cheap hotel nearby. He is a young man from Kazakhstan, and we strike up a pleasant conversation. He’s here to study. He works the night shift so he can take classes during the day, and he doesn’t drink. He came here because his brother came first and liked it. I probe him for some deeper explanation, but that’s all he gives me. He has a girlfriend who works at a hair salon. I ask him if he’s going to marry her. Perhaps, he says, but he wants to get his degree first.

  “She’ll wait for you?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Then get three degrees,” I reply.

  We laugh because it is a stupid joke and because it is something we have in common.

  “When you get your degree and you get married, will you stay here in Brooklyn or will you leave?”

  He doesn’t answer right away. “Maybe,” he says in an unconvincing tone.

  He drops me off at a Best Western, and as he’s pulling away, I realize I forgot to ask him his name.

  What did they do to my childhood Brooklyn? When did this part of Brooklyn become Little Odessa? It was gradual, I know, and no one took notice of it until recently. But this is what immigrants do, no? We come here to an inhospitable land, as if under cover of night, find a place that time has forgotten, and make it our own. We find comfort in whatever is handed to us. Koreatown, Little India, Ironbound, Little Odessa—we will take it. We will triumph. The question is: For how long? And for how long do we get to preserve any culture imported from our homeland in a sealed bubble before it becomes watered down, thinned out to a milky semblance of the tradition of our motherland? How do we measure that loss? In months, in years, in generations? How long will it be before the children of Yousef decide that the Lagman Soup needs to be more mainstream? Is it when he is too old to see, too old to care; or when he dies and his memory is too faded to matter?

  I don’t know how long Kashkar Café will stick around. In the end, though, it is not my fight. Kashkar will never make it to the top of a Zagat list, but it is a special place serving a unique cuisine—I hardly ever use the word unique, but in this case, it fits—and I am lucky to have eaten there.

  What happened to my childhood Brooklyn? I don’t know because I left. And the best thing about coming back is learning that it was never mine in the first place.

  I wake up to my alarm clock and the sun already shining on Emmons Avenue. I’m late. I’ve barely slept, but I don’t want to miss the fishing boats. I hurry out and jog over to Sheepshead Bay. There is a narrow wharf that is home to a handful of fishing boats that go out daily on the choppy Atlantic waters. Most of the boats have already set sail. The ones that are left are waiting for last-minute passengers. A thin crowd of people holding forlorn fishing rods waits to get going. Most of the rigs employ a guy who stands at the edge of the dock luring customers—cash deal, about forty dollars for a morning ride out to catch porgy and bass and blackfish. The rest of the boats on the wharf are party boats, large semiluxury outfits that take groups of people out to drink and dance until they start vomiting overboard. These have nothing to do with fishing. I walk up to one of the pitch men, a small Italian American about two hundred years old who is wrapped up in several layers of old coats. He can barely stand. “You’re guaranteed a good haul,” he says. “We go out the whole day. We’re the best rig, hands down.” When he realizes that I won’t be getting on the boat, that I’m there just to ask questions, he says something in Italian I don’t understand and turns around to tell the captain to go ahead.

  The Brooklyn I remember was very Italian. The funny, sardonic Italian guys spoke their own version of wiseguy, gangster dialect. They lived their lives thick inside an Italian American culture without much need to integrate with the new immigrants surrounding them. There is an old bait and tackle shop in Sheepshead Bay called Stella Maris Fishing Station. If you hang out there long enough, you see the remnants of the old neighborhood, the Italian brothers cracking jokes as if The Sopranos was still on the air. This place has been owned by the same family since 1947, and it is an essential part of a fishing industry that is quickly disappearing. Everyone gives a different reason for the decline: the fishing isn’t what it used to be, the tourists don’t come anymore, the neighborhood has changed, “people just don’t wanna fish no more.” The underlying message, though, is uncertainty. In a neighborhood where the Russian immigrants are in control of the economy, a niche industry such as charter fishing boats may not have a place. When I was growing up, these fishing boats were a popular weekend diversion. Whether heading to Sheepshead Bay or down the Jersey Shore to Belmar, the boats were packed with people. It wasn’t sport fishing—the boats using sonar to position themselves, and twenty people reeling in as much haul as they could for their dinner table. My mom always let me go fishing because she knew I’d come back with thirty pounds of bluefish slung over my shoulder, and that would be dinner for weeks.

  There is very little left of that culture here, except for a few restaurants hanging on to the old days. Randazzo’s Clam Bar, on Emmons Avenue, is a classic. A neon lobster signals to you from afar. The restaurant’s famous red sauce has kept Randazzo’s afloat for deca
des. The sauce is fine, and the calamari are crispy. I’m told that, in the old days, they used to buy the squid right from the docks. I prefer to go to Maria’s, on the same street, which has been serving the same menu for eighty years. What you get here are the staples: chicken parm, baked clams, overcooked pasta, nostalgia on a plate. Those industrial-era, unbreakable, inch-thick ceramic plates can make any food look heavy and unappetizing. There is nothing spectacular about the meal, but it satisfies me. It makes me happy to know these places are still around, that when all else fades away, the last bastion of Brooklyn Italian American culture will be a restaurant that features live shows by Sal Casta.

  Take a dish and change one ingredient. Is it still the same dish? Take a neighborhood and swap out one culture for another. Is it still the same American dream?

  Lagman Soup

  This is a simpler version of the soup I had at Kashkar, but it’s just as delicious. It is pungent and floral and warms the body from the inside out. I have tasted lagman soups that are almost stew-like, but I like this lighter one with noodles. At Kashkar, they serve a small cruet of vinegar on the side that you can add to the soup. I include vinegar in the recipe itself to brighten the hearty stock, but if you prefer, you can omit it when you make the soup and just add a little at the table when you eat it.

  Serves 4 as a main course

  2 lamb shanks (about 1 pound each)