Uzbek food in Queens and Brooklyn.

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Uma’s and Chayhana Salom

The air smells of salt and sunscreen, cumin and lamb, the Silk Road and the boardwalk. Out front is a surf rack slapped with stickers for Futures Fins and Mucho Aloha beer; inside are hulking Central Asian meat pastries the recipes for which reach back to the time of the Khans.

Uma’s opened last summer in Rockaway Beach, Queens, within a sprint of the sand, if not in view of it. It might be the only Uzbek restaurant in the United States (or the world) with surfboard parking, the Velvet Underground blaring and organic kale salad as an occasional special. The owners, Conrad Karl and his wife, Umida, known as Uma, are locals, residents of neighboring Belle Harbor, but he grew up in Philadelphia, she in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. (She’s the chef.)

For those who live in the Rockaways year-round, the cuisine of the steppe no doubt brought comfort during the long winter. The surprise is how well it suits this indolent, sun-stunned season, when the peninsula’s fair-weather friends come slouching back on the A train.

Roasted peppers and fried eggplant give a smoky underscore to fresh tomatoes, with annotations of raw garlic. This would be lovely on its own; heaped with feta, it evokes pasta alla Norma and a Mediterranean detour. A carrot salad is practically all carrot, skinny strips that crunch and sear, assailed by paprika and cayenne and tasting almost pickled from a douse of lemon. It’s the most refreshing dish here, a salute to the ethnic Koreans from the Soviet Far East who were forcibly resettled in Central Asia under Stalin.

Part of the menu drifts along the dumpling-empanada spectrum. Samsa call to mind croissants that have both swollen up and hunkered down; the puff-pastry-like dough fractures to reveal still-seething ground meat inside. Manti are likewise grand in scale, but steamed, their dumpling skins gathered and draped around the meat, here nearly outmuscled by onions. Pelmeni, adapted from the Russians, are smaller dumplings, meeker despite an assault with cumin. (Black cumin is a motif here, imported from Uzbekistan, stronger and sweeter than the white variety.)

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These dishes are friendly and accessible, as is the restaurant’s laid-back, urban-beach décor, with Edison bulbs, a black-and-white photograph of Duke Kahanamoku on the back wall (“He’s sort of our god in Rockaway,” Mr. Karl said) and a child’s surfboard leaning in a corner. (It belongs to the Karls’ 8-year-old daughter, Maya, who tied for first place in her age division in a recent surfing contest.) Servers are languid but cheerful. The equally cheerful crowd isn’t trying too hard, save for stray hipsters, recognizable by their ironic notions of beachwear (fishnets, blazers over naked chests).

For more of a sense of Uzbek history, order lagman, thick hand-stretched noodles served here in a dark beef-stock soup loaded with rough cuts of beef and vegetables and thatched with dill. It is gentle at first, but that is easily remedied by the condiments: a thumb’s worth of chili paste (go all in) and white vinegar with bobbing garlic cloves.

Then comes plov, Uzbekistan’s national dish, pronounced much like “pilaf.” It sprawls, the rice strewn with thick carrots and seemingly hand-torn hunks of meat, and sown with sour red raisins shipped from Uzbekistan. The rice is just shy of tender, with genuine texture, but on a recent evening it tasted a little weighed down by oil.

The Karls told me that Samarkand plov is the original plov, the true plov, cooked in layers so that the rice soaks up the meaty runoff. Across Rockaway Inlet, in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, I heard a different story from Murat Khojimatov, who runs the Uzbek restaurant Chayhana Salom: “Tashkent plov is world famous.” He and his business partner, Farida Ganieva, who oversees the kitchen, are both natives of Tashkent, the Uzbek capital.

Mr. Khojimatov explained that they first cook the meat — here lamb — with the vegetables, then add rice and water and let it all steam. This sounds similar to Samarkand plov, but no matter. It looks and tastes different from Uma’s version, a low mound of rice, the grains loose, light and fragrant and stained gold, and the carrots orange and yellow, diced fine. On top lies a single quail egg, as if the rubble of lamb were a nest.

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Since emigrating to the United States more than a decade ago, Mr. Khojimatov and Ms. Ganieva have worked in a number of Russian restaurants in south Brooklyn. They opened Chayhana Salom in October 2012. Three weeks later, Mr. Khojimatov’s wife gave birth and Hurricane Sandy struck.

Happy ending: the restaurant reopened within two months. Behind its slightly grubby storefront is a charming room, clean and bright, painted in celery green. On the walls hang little pictures in twig frames bound by thread, alongside oversize spoons with beaded handles and, on mini shelves, figurines in tunics and belted embroidered coats, posed next to clay ovens. Food is served on formal china with glimmers of gilt.

Every meal should include patir, so gorgeously fluffy it hardly merits the term flatbread, the dough crimpled into a fat plait around the perimeter, firmer at the edges and buttery almost to the point of dampness at the center. Samsa are packed less tightly here, so the ground lamb filling falls apart instantly in the mouth. Peppers and tomatoes are again consort to fried eggplant, only here the eggplant is cut into almost flimsy petals that come closer to crispiness.

Lagman noodles are wonderfully chewy, whether plunged in soup, as at Uma’s, or turned hot and sour in a frying pan with paprika, cumin, garlic and vinegar. Then there is the mystery of narin, in which beef and noodles are sliced into thin strands and tousled together. It looks like slaw and tastes bewilderingly good, oscillating in degrees of tenderness and salt, until you can’t distinguish beef from noodles.

For dessert, there is the traditional Uzbek dessert of chak-chak, tubular fragments of fried dough glommed together with honey. This is sort of like eating bricks of broken, sticky, vaguely sweet pretzels. Afterward, the waiter may drop a handful of Wrigley’s gum on the table.

Chak-chak also appears at Uma’s, brought in from an Uzbek bakery in Queens and rather the worse for the journey, nearly impenetrable by fork. Better to order the vanilla ice cream, made in-house and topped with a chunky quince jam, simmered for two days until floral and just sweet enough. The jam is Uzbek, but the ice cream, voluptuous and ready to melt, is all-American.