Olga Berrin laments the dark-colored root vegetables and scrawny meat she’s forced to work with. In Uzbekistan, she says, the carrots are light yellow and taste better, and the sheep tails are swollen with the rich fat used in many of that country’s dishes—particularly the rice, meat, and vegetable dish known as plov, the defining food of the region.
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Since they’ve got what seems to be the only restaurant in the area dedicated to the food of this crucial leg of the historic Silk Road, they could probably get away without baking their own bread or pickling their own watermelon. But they do it anyway; almost everything they make is from scratch. “This is how it tastes good,” says Berrin, who arrives each morning at nine to make lepeshki, round loaves of bread flattened in the center with a circular pinprick design. (They look sort of like giant bialys.) In fact, both women seem puzzled by my interest in what they do, as if it never occurred to them that there would be any other way. “We come in the morning, we preparing the food, we cook the food, and we serve,” Berrin says wearily. “This is our day.”
Chaihanna, more often spelled choyhona, means “teahouse,” and in Uzbekistan the teahouse is the center of social interaction. Ideally in a shaded outdoor setting near a stream, it’s a place where folks—men, for the most part—while away the hours, drinking tea and snacking at leisure. That’s hemispheres away from the soulless-looking suburban strip mall that houses Chaihanna, but inside, decorative touches like the gorgeous hand-painted blue and white china encourage a reasonable suspension of disbelief. And the pace is authentically measured and relaxed.
That’s another Uzbek tradition—plov making is men’s work. Here in the New World, though, the women have more practical concerns. “He’s the one who knows how to make it,” says Berrin.
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