While researching the menu before an upcoming meal at this Uzbek restaurant, I came across another restaurant called Urgut Tandir Express. Since both restaurants are named for the same small town near Samarkand, it’s not surprising that their menus would be similar, too. But as it happens, the two businesses are related; the success of the quick-serve shop seems to have inspired the opening of the larger “osh markazi,” which I believe means “plov center.”
I’ll have to stop by Urgut Tandir Express on my way to Urgut Osh Markazi – it’s all of a half-mile away.
One dish that I don’t see on the menu but that I do see on the restaurant’s social media is kurutob (sometimes spelled with an initial Q). It’s named for a salty yogurt sauce and also features shreds of flaky flatbread. Many versions include lamb. This vegetarian version, which fit better into a meal for two, was topped with a fresh salad instead.
Ok, if you all can resist the impulse to take this thread further off topic, I’d like to mention that I think that I’ve made a reservation for 6 of us at 4pm tomorrow (Thursday). It required filling out a short form and pressing “submit”. I will not comment on how difficult it is for me to do so, but I submitted. Me, Ginny, Dave, Ike, Jen & Jim. Report to follow, either here or on another thread
A finished scrabble board is like a Rorschach test, the words you see or don’t see say a lot about you. Obviously, you’re a well-adjusted New Yorker. I, on the other hand, see a lot of nyc words: rages, irate, tear, dome (pizza term), don and nit come to mind.
Would say more but don’t want to encourage thread drift.
Not SteveR, but since we’re drifting… mine used to be raise or arise, but I’ve moved on to alert. Got today’s on the second (more luck than skill, quite obviously).
One day it will work at first go, just as my previous one ROUTE did a few months ago. I was too busy weeping with joy to note what that made me but I’m guessing “genius” (I always suspected that about me).
Oh, food: The side order of hot sauce at Alidoro is worth its weight in ghosts. $1.50. More on this in the Penn thread.
My mom, an author and a newspaper editor, was a good scrabble player and her mom was also strong so, in an attempt to add more flair their nightly games, they made up some rules. at first it was just disallowing certain two letter words: “Jo was Swedish”, “fa not a real word” and a bunch of others. The banning of a word worked like this: “you’re going to play “em” again? Boring!” So the offender would guiltily pick up their letters and the word was banned for life.
And woe to the interloper (me) when we played three handed and say I proudly threw down “ka” on a triple. First the look between them and then “uh uh, try again, we got rid of that word after your aunt Sadie passed away in Egypt”.
At some point they decided to play with no two letter words as a reaction to the scrabble dictionary inclusion of stuff like ai and ew.
We played a ton of scrabble growing up and there was no dictionary of any sort allowed, and no 2 letter words. House rule was that if you couldn’t explain the word you couldn’t use it.
Fast forward to college, my best friend’s mom - a Scrabble fiend - discovered I grew up playing and wanted to play every time I went to stay. It was my first introduction to the Scrabble dictionary, and it felt so much like cheating that I was apalled . She agreed to play without it once and got beaten so badly that I had to acquiesce to playing her way instead . When she met my dad at graduation, my Scrabble “training” was discussed at length
. She agreed to play without it once and got beaten so badly that I had to acquiesce to playing her way instead 
. When she met my dad at graduation, my Scrabble “training” was discussed at length 
