Location, location, location is a familiar mantra of New York real estate; invariably it comes to bear on restaurants and other food businesses, too. When e-commerce giant Amazon decided not to build a second headquarters in Long Island City, many food vendors were disappointed, sometimes bitterly, at the loss of a possible 25,000 new customers. With an eye on the lunchtime rush just across the Hudson River, in Manhattan, they wondered, why not in Queens? By contrast, continual development in Flushing, albeit on a much smaller scale, continues to displace many small businesses. The food stalls in the lower level of the celebrated Golden Mall shuttered in late summer for a renovation that was planned to last several months; it seems nowhere near completion.

Chaikhana Sem Sorok, a newly opened little café just off the Central Asian thoroughfare of 63rd Drive in Rego Park, proves more than anywhere else that all cuisines are fusion cuisines, if you go back far enough. Every day but Saturday – the Sabbath – loaves of round, crusty bread called non or lepyoshka emerge from the restaurant’s towering brick tanur oven. They’re distinctly Uzbek, but share Persian roots with the naan of the Indian subcontinent. Meanwhile, samsas, similar to samosas, bake while clinging to the sides of another tile tanur, which was built in Samarkand and shipped to Rego Park. Filled with onions and either lamb, pumpkin or beef, and lightly charred like a Neapolitan pizza, they are Chaikhana’s big draw.