Should a Bukharian Restaurant Meal Cost $200? Queens and Israeli Writers Question Feast Culture

A Bukharian Times report on a new kosher café in Moscow has set off a reader debate about how Bukharian Jews eat out in Queens and Israel, and what it costs them.

On Sept. 17, editor Rafael Nektalov reported that brothers Yuri and Alexei Mullokandov, natives of Samarkand, had opened the café “Kosher Style” with a kashrut certificate presented Sept. 9 by Russia’s chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, who praised its prices. A week later, the paper published two responses.

“It is not the restaurateurs who must change our culture”

Queens writer Rafael Normatov wrote that what worries him most is the state of Bukharian banquets in New York at weddings, bar mitzvahs, birthdays and memorial meals. Prices are soaring, he wrote, but so is the amount of food: tables overflow with dishes guests cannot even taste, and much of it ends up in garbage bags. He did not blame restaurants. “The restaurant serves what we order,” he wrote. “We seem to be competing with each other.” He added: “Real hospitality is respect for the guest.”

Normatov also noted how few places are left where families can simply sit down. Beyond “L’chaim,” “Art Grill,” “Avenue” and “Ohr Yehuda,” he wrote, there are mostly catering halls.

A call for an affordable “dastarkhan”

Leonid Elizarov, editor of the Israeli newspaper Menora, compared the Moscow café’s menu, where a business lunch costs about $3.30 and plov about $7.70, with what families pay elsewhere. He cautioned that rent, wages and taxes differ in Queens and Tel Aviv. But he cited Nektalov as saying a full meal at a good Bukharian restaurant in New York can approach, and easily exceed, $200 per person. In Israel, he wrote, a family with four to six children faces a heavy bill too.

Elizarov proposed that community entrepreneurs or philanthropists open a modest, clean Bukharian café serving plov, bakhsh, manti, samsa, shurpa, shashlik and bread at prices families can manage. “Good national food should not become a luxury,” he wrote.

This report was translated from Russian by Bukharian Jewish Post from columns published in The Bukharian Times.

Sources: The Bukharian Times (Normatov, Sept. 24); The Bukharian Times (Elizarov, Sept. 24); The Bukharian Times (Nektalov, Sept. 17).