The best way to enter the Albanian restaurant Cka Ka Qellu, if not the most direct, starts on Arthur Avenue. Arrive before the fish shops along this famous, not-quite-faded Italian strip in the Bronx take in the iced clams and octopus for the night. Across from Dominick’s, turn into the indoor market that Fiorello La Guardia ordered up. Move on past the hand-rolled cigars and the T-shirts reflecting various tenets of Bronx philosophy. Keep going beyond the scamorza, the soppressata and the ready-to-go heroes, and walk out the door on to Hughes Avenue. Just to the right is a spinning wheel that looks old enough to have been Rumpelstiltskin’s and next to it, another door. Open it, walk inside.
The short trip seems to have taken you back in time. The spinning wheel turns out to be just one piece in Cka Ka Qellu’s collection of antique tools, stringed instruments, yokes, brass coffee mills, manual typewriters, dishes of hammered metal and embroidered costumes that the owner, Ramiz Kukaj, brought over from the old country. Some, he says, go back to the 18th century. The floors and walls seem to have been airlifted from an Albanian farmhouse, and the speakers play wistful folk tunes on traditional instruments, not the modern, globally aware wake-up calls of the brass band Fanfara Tirana. The restaurant is soaked in nostalgia.
The other reason for the walk from Arthur Avenue is that it recapitulates a pattern that’s repeated throughout this neighborhood, where the signs and menus facing the street are still written in Italian but many of the people in the back rooms, seasoning the sausages and frying the veal cutlets, are Albanian.
Here and there, those Albanians have brought a little of their cuisine into those Italian businesses. Cumin-laden suxhuk sausages hang to dry in the salumerias. In some pizzerias, the burek challenges the Jamaican beef patty for outsider meat-pie supremacy. One such place, also owned by Mr. Kukaj, is in the Norwood neighborhood and is called Tradita. (Ligaya Mishan reviewed it in 2017.) But if you want a deep-end Albanian experience, Cka Ka Qellu, pronounced SHA ka chell-OO, is the place to go.
As in Albania, boiled coffee, a very strong brew, is served from a long-handled pot.CreditAn Rong Xu for The New York Times
The kitchen does not focus on the seafood of Albania’s Adriatic coast, or the more intensely Greek- and Turkish-leaning cuisine of its southern reaches. Instead, it heavily favors the north, which shares many dishes with the former components of Yugoslavia that are its neighbors. In particular there is a strong overlap with Kosovo, home to many ethnic Albanians including, at one time, Mr. Kukaj and his chef, Afrim Kaliqani.
In their kitchen, yogurt and cream are everywhere, along with curds of soft fresh cheese and triangles of creamy, unsqueaky feta. A good portion of the menu could be described as things in a creamy white sauce. Another, entirely different portion could be described as creamy white sauce with things in it.
Included in the second group are some of the dips that are almost obligatory at the start of your Cka Ka Qellu experience: tarator, tart yogurt with minced cucumbers, garlic and parsley, similar to tzatziki, but nearly as fluffy as whipped cream; cream stirred with bits of suxhuk to give it a pinkish tint and a suggestion of spice; and kajmak, which our server described as “like butter for bread” and I would say was like crème fraîche blended with cream cheese and butter. (In parts of Albania, it would be made by boiling unpasteurized milk from water buffalo.)
I found myself dipping sausages, vegetables and just about everything else into the kajmak, but it is exceptionally good with a warm slice of the bread that Cka Ka Qellu bakes in the pizza oven that is the first thing you see when you walk in. When the menu defines kacamak as “cream with polenta,” the cream in question is kajmak, stirred into a fine-grained, nearly white mass of cornmeal that takes on the lightly fluffed quality of really well-made mashed potatoes.
Sometimes there is a creamy sauce where you don’t expect one. Each slice of lecenik, a cornbread with spinach and cottage cheese that is so rich it is only a few rungs in the ladder from cheesecake, comes to the table under a spoonful of kajmak. Sometimes there is no creamy sauce where one would do some good. The restaurant’s version of fli, the slow-baked, many-layered pancake, is served as a long, narrow wedge with no accompaniment, although it is somewhat less than fully tender and moist. Luckily it responds immediately to any spare yogurt you can forage from elsewhere on the table.
The mantia, baked dumplings filled with ground veal and onions, will seem tough and dry, too, if you order them alone. The same mantia cooked with yogurt in a clay dish will seem perfect.
Is there another restaurant in New York that makes as much use of veal, and as little of any other meat, as Cka Ka Qellu? It is the main ingredient in the restaurant’s qofte, ground and mixed with onions and red pepper; and in its qebapa, mild skinless sausages cooked on the grill. (The sausages would be called cevapi in other corners of the Balkans, where they are likely to be made from lamb or beef.)
Veal works its way into many of the clay-dish stews, including the veal tava, something like a Mediterranean ratatouille that got itself entangled with a meat-and-potato stew from another part of Europe. Rolled up with cheeses and smoked meat, breaded and fried, veal also serves as the filling for the alluring Skanderbeg. Named after a great patriotic hero of the 15th century, Skanderbeg is generally called Albania’s national dish, although its resemblance to a kayak made from chicken cordon bleu renders it something of an outlier in the cuisine. Ladled along its crunchy, golden length is — please rise and face Hughes Avenue — a creamy white sauce.
Eating all of this without a salad is unimaginable and probably unadvisable. Each of Cka Ka Qellu’s several salads seems to consist of cucumbers, tomatoes, red onions and cheese in slightly different arrangements. If the vegetables were any fresher, you’d be embarrassed to eat them in public. Surprise appearances by olives and their ilk provide extra variety.
Like the breads, the desserts are baked on site: syrup-soaked baklava, a nut cake called haxhimak, a sugar cookie with nuts pressed into the top whose Albanian name is sheqerpare. I like them best with coffee boiled on the stove in a long-handled brass pitcher and served on a matching tray, both of them engraved with ancient, geometric designs that repeat and repeat.
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