Cafe Lily, Bensonhurst’s Second Uzbek-Russian-Korean Restaurant, Opens On Avenue O
A second Uzbek-Russian-Korean restaurant opened in the Bensonhurst area last month, replacing Uzbechka, a popular Uzbek restaurant that closed after just one year in business.
Cafe Lily (42 Avenue O), located just over the Bensonhurst-Gravesend border, offers generous servings of the delicious hybrid cuisine of Uzbekistan’s Koreo Saram population — ethnic Koreans who migrated to Uzbekistan during the 1930s — for affordable prices.
Much has been written about Cafe At Your Mother-in-Law, which was previously Brooklyn’s sole purveyor of the unique fare since 2001. While Cafe Lily does not stray far from the same food tradition — with its pickled salads, chili-based condiments, complex soups, and meaty, lamb-soaked mains — the restaurant offers a unique dining experience when it comes to ambiance and decor.
While At Your Mother-in Law’s Bensonhurst location is more of a take-out kitchen, Cafe Lily serves the distinctive fare in a spacious, decidedly festive environment. From the wall-sized projector screen featuring music videos or the soccer game, to a Uzbek-style outdoor table (set with glass and china, with throw pillows for chairs), to the stage area in a banquet-style indoor dining room, Cafe Lily looks as if a party of 40 is expected to arrive at any minute.
We recently stopped in to try the restaurant’s hye: cold salads of cucumber, fish, or eggplant, cured in spices and vinegar that are unique to Koreo Saram cuisine.
Soft red and yellow peppers and cilantro add a nice twist to the eggplant hye, which pairs well with airy, brick oven-baked Turkish bread from a nearby Samarkand-style bakery. The fish and cucumber salads were similarly refreshing and bursting with fiery flavor.
“It’s hot in Uzbekistan and there is no refrigerator, so we use a lot of spices to make it last. That’s why we have a lot of salads,” explained waiter Dennis Pak, who opened the restaurant last month with his aunt, owner and chef Lilya Pyagay.
By the time we left Cafe Lily, we had also tried their fern — a Russian grass soaked overnight and then sautéed with bits of beef — their blood sausage, and a begodya bun.
The thick fern grass was surprisingly crunchy, the texture of asparagus, with a sprinkling of chili pepper and flecks beef adding a subtle kick.
The swollen begodya was simple, doughy, and filling, and at $2 a piece, affordable. The steamed bun, which comes stuffed with lightly flavored ground beef and cabbage and accompanied by a blood-red chili sauce, is a “popular after-school snack for kids” in Uzbekistan, according to Pak. But despite the food’s simplicity, mastering the bun’s moist, stretchy texture is quite complicated, according to Pak.
“We must have made 100 of these before we got it right,” he said.
Pak says a visit to Uzbekistan last year inspired him to try to recreate the food and traditions of Uzbekistan’s Korea Saram that his family left behind when they moved from Tashkent to Brooklyn more than a decade ago. When the owners of Uzbechka told Pyagay that the restaurant was available, her nephew urged her to jump at the opportunity.
“We are trying to kind to keep the culture alive,” said Pak.
