Captain Oblivious Goes To Uygur: Mk II!
Feb. 15th, 2009 12:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bliumchikToday my parents and I went to an awesome restaurant just off Liverpool St called Apandim Uighur. It was a family friend's birthday again, Slav, who knows the owner. His family's Uzbeki, which is ethnically and culturally close to Uygur (well, overlapping, technically - Eurasia! It's complicated! I need a Venn diagram the size of Tasmania, I swear. And it really doesn't help that the word Caucasian has somehow been coopted to mean "pale of skin" instead of "from the Caucasus region" at some point since Brecht's time), so they go there for a taste of the Old Country, as it were. It's a new and slightly fancier version of the one we went to last time Slav had a birthday (run by the same people). (Incidentally his wife Ita is now incredibly pregnant - and still at work despite being pretty much ready to pop! Not twins though :P)
The restaurant is really nicely furnished - the main area is tastefully decorated in brown, white and subdued gold, with dark solid wooden tables that fit into the room really well. (This effect was slightly undermined by a couple of brightly coloured balloons and for some reason a disco ball.) A separate curtained-off section contains a traditional Uzbeki dining area, the glimpse I got of which was very red-orange with low tables and cushions. Uygur food is a pretty interesting blend of Turkish, Russian and Chinese styles (noodles and rice shared the menu with some very European salads and a whole lamb on a spit. This latter went for $450 and three days notice, presumably to catch the little bugger). Slav's mother once again ordered kebabs for the whole table, but I decided to try the noodles this time. They were served on a square plate in a reddish sauce which turned out to be a little spicy, but not spicy enough to prevent me from digging right in with the aid of some turkish bread. The noodles were a little doughier than most Chinese ones I've had, but tasty. Picking the menu item that said "fine" meat and vegetables turned out to be a bad idea, though, because they were practically shredded and impossibly to pick up along with the noodles.
Then the belly-dancer came out! She was amazing. She looked like she was having a lot of fun, too. Her outfit was your standard bikini-and-sarong Exotic Dancer fare (except a little bit too LIIIME GREEEEN) so you could clearly see her hips doing utterly impossible things. It compared very favourably to the can-can dancers at the Russian Coachman, who were a little kitschy and fake and relied a little too much on matter-of-fact flashing of underwear and didn't look all that energetic about it. She kept looping her (LIIIME GREEEEN) sash around guys' necks and pulling them onto the dance floor, but most of them got shy and awkward and passed the sash on to someone else pretty quickly. Later she went and came back with a silver cane/staff thing with a snake-head crook that she also used to tug people onto the floor, in between twirling it like a pro.
Later the dance floor went to the general public, who were almost as fun to watch. The Russian/Uzbeki dance style pretty much involve sticking your arms out like a windmill and hopping around, and I couldn't help but think it was invented by people who tended to go dancing while smashed off their faces on vodka and fermented milk and thus requiring the extra balancing aid of the outflung arms. I was even persuaded to go up and join in for one song - turns out my boots are just clicky enough to work pretty well for it. The songs, incidentally, were half out of Eurovision and half actually quite interesting pan-Asian stuff I haven't seen before, because of course Japan and Korea churn out most of the Asian pop we actually hear over here.
Overall it was a great experience and the food wasn't too expensive, either - 8 to 15 dollars for most reasonable dishes, just like every non-dodgy Chinese takeaway ever. So I definitely recommend it and would like to go back there. Oh, just one down point - the bathrooms were really gross, specifically the floors. I just, I don't even, WHAT could possibly happen to make the floor that dirty in the FEMALE TOILETS? It was raining so I assume it's not normally that bad, but still, did every single patron tread in as much mud as they could find outside and then head straight for the toilets?
Anyway, now I think I'm going to get sucked in by Wikipedia-hopping until I collapse from exhaustion, omg. Where is my Venn diagraaaaam?
The restaurant is really nicely furnished - the main area is tastefully decorated in brown, white and subdued gold, with dark solid wooden tables that fit into the room really well. (This effect was slightly undermined by a couple of brightly coloured balloons and for some reason a disco ball.) A separate curtained-off section contains a traditional Uzbeki dining area, the glimpse I got of which was very red-orange with low tables and cushions. Uygur food is a pretty interesting blend of Turkish, Russian and Chinese styles (noodles and rice shared the menu with some very European salads and a whole lamb on a spit. This latter went for $450 and three days notice, presumably to catch the little bugger). Slav's mother once again ordered kebabs for the whole table, but I decided to try the noodles this time. They were served on a square plate in a reddish sauce which turned out to be a little spicy, but not spicy enough to prevent me from digging right in with the aid of some turkish bread. The noodles were a little doughier than most Chinese ones I've had, but tasty. Picking the menu item that said "fine" meat and vegetables turned out to be a bad idea, though, because they were practically shredded and impossibly to pick up along with the noodles.
Then the belly-dancer came out! She was amazing. She looked like she was having a lot of fun, too. Her outfit was your standard bikini-and-sarong Exotic Dancer fare (except a little bit too LIIIME GREEEEN) so you could clearly see her hips doing utterly impossible things. It compared very favourably to the can-can dancers at the Russian Coachman, who were a little kitschy and fake and relied a little too much on matter-of-fact flashing of underwear and didn't look all that energetic about it. She kept looping her (LIIIME GREEEEN) sash around guys' necks and pulling them onto the dance floor, but most of them got shy and awkward and passed the sash on to someone else pretty quickly. Later she went and came back with a silver cane/staff thing with a snake-head crook that she also used to tug people onto the floor, in between twirling it like a pro.
Later the dance floor went to the general public, who were almost as fun to watch. The Russian/Uzbeki dance style pretty much involve sticking your arms out like a windmill and hopping around, and I couldn't help but think it was invented by people who tended to go dancing while smashed off their faces on vodka and fermented milk and thus requiring the extra balancing aid of the outflung arms. I was even persuaded to go up and join in for one song - turns out my boots are just clicky enough to work pretty well for it. The songs, incidentally, were half out of Eurovision and half actually quite interesting pan-Asian stuff I haven't seen before, because of course Japan and Korea churn out most of the Asian pop we actually hear over here.
Overall it was a great experience and the food wasn't too expensive, either - 8 to 15 dollars for most reasonable dishes, just like every non-dodgy Chinese takeaway ever. So I definitely recommend it and would like to go back there. Oh, just one down point - the bathrooms were really gross, specifically the floors. I just, I don't even, WHAT could possibly happen to make the floor that dirty in the FEMALE TOILETS? It was raining so I assume it's not normally that bad, but still, did every single patron tread in as much mud as they could find outside and then head straight for the toilets?
Anyway, now I think I'm going to get sucked in by Wikipedia-hopping until I collapse from exhaustion, omg. Where is my Venn diagraaaaam?
