Padishah

TAJIKISTAN 🇹🇯
UZBEKISTAN 🇺🇿

While I rarely (read: never) use Yelp for gathering opinions of positivity, I have come to the conclusion that it does have some use in our society. For the cuisines of former Soviet countries, you can be guaranteed to find a long list of whiney reviewers unhappy with their service in area restaurants. If you take these as a whole, there could be some reverse relationship with how good the food turns out to be. Testing this theory, we headed to Padishah on Avenue U in Sheepshead Bay, which has a growing number of critics.

Our 19:00 start time was on the early side for a Friday, but the restaurant filled up nicely as we progressed through our meal. Two couples sat and ate together, but the rest of the tables were mostly groups of men drinking multiple 1.75L bottles of vodka and Johnny Walker Red, using their water glasses to fill up for constant toasts.

As our first cold dishes began arriving like the Tashkent salad ($9.95, above), a woman took a seat in the front window and began singing along with her karaoke machine. She would be our entertainment for the evening, and sort of faded into the background rather than being too loud.

Eggplant salad $8.50

Along with these salads, the lepeshka bread ($4 each, not pictured) was very strong here, fluffy and served warm from the oven.

Korean carrot $8.50

Achichuk $7.95

The warm courses started with Uzbek lamb plov ($8.95, above, two portions shown), a better than average rendition and then continued with samsa ($2.29 each, below), cheburek ($2.75 each), and kootabi ($2.50 each).

Cheburek.

Kootabi. There were two, the first was grabbed before photo!

The chef and owner here is Tajik but was raised in Uzbekistan. The cuisine tends to focus on the foods that overlap between the two countries, of which there is plenty. An order of the manti ($6.95, below) was appreciated by the whole table.

Also above average was their selection of shish kebabs ($4.50-5.95 each, below), that spanned the range of available offerings. Chicken hearts, veal liver, a couple different lamb and beef preparations were all included in the array.

The grilled vegetable kebabs ($4.95, below) are also worth including in your spread.

In what seemed like a flurry, we were finished, but actually a good chunk of time had passed and the giant bottles of liquor had all been finished on other tables. Or maybe they just drank fast?

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SHEEPSHEAD BAY Brooklyn

1920 Avenue U

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