Hanan Margilan, Tel Aviv

Wanting to surprise my culinarily adventurous husband, I booked a dinner for us at Hanan Margilan, a Bukharan restaurant in the Shapira neighborhood of Tel Aviv. The #17 bus took us from our semi Parisian Bograshov street, snaked slowly down Allenby, the lively Carmel Market, the bustling western part of the Lewinsky market and finally down a wide Meshilat Yesharim street in the heart of the very diverse Shapira neighborhood. Shapira, once predominantly immigrant neighborhood is gaining in popularity among young people who are being chased out of other areas of Tel Aviv due to the high housing costs. This neighborhood is the place for some really terrific Chinese, Ethiopian, and Bukharan food.

Bukhara is a city in Uzbekistan, but the term Bukharan refers to all Central Asian Jews (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakstan and Turkmenistan - all part of the former Soviet Union), whose history in the area dates back 2,500 years. Bukharan Jews call themselves Yahudi and speak Bukhori or Judeo-Tajik, a dialect of the Tajiki-Persian language that incorporated many Hebrew words. They migrated to the U.S., and Israel due to religious and ethnic discrimination.

Hanan Margilan, a restaurant that is considered to offer the best of Bukharan cuisine in Tel Aviv, is located in a small building that has clearly seen better days. The interior of the restaurant reminded me of almost every Polish/Russian restaurant in Brooklyn where one can find a simple decor with some wildly extravagant accents like a crystal chandelier or a water fountain. I was also expecting the food to be as good as in the Polish/Russian restaurants in Brooklyn; decent, but nothing worth a repeat visit.

We were handed a laminated menu card, which was in Hebrew and Russian. Having learned Russian as a kid growing up in Poland, I was able to read the names of the dishes but still didn't understand what they actually meant. Dushpera, plov, lepeshka; these words meant absolutely nothing to me, but thankfully, the lovely woman who runs the restaurant with her family, spoke English and was able to help us put together a nice variety of dishes to sample.

We began with this very rich Dushpera - beef soup with meat dumplings.

Next came this seemingly simple but delicious salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, and onion, which was dressed with parsley, salt, pepper and olive oil.

This was a samosi/samsa - baked pastry with lamb and onion.

The manti - steamed dumplings filled with meat and onion were outstanding and memorable.

And then came the Palav/Plov. This simple rice with carrots and meat was so spectacularly delicious, so wonderfully rich and tasty, that my husband and I ate the first few bites in complete silence looking at each other in disbelief.