DE
SI
the
ON
NEARLY EVERY DISH AT CAFÉ DIYOR WAS HEAVILY SPRINKLED WITH DILL
HIGH SCORE {BY CHARLIE DEITCH} Many people are trying to buy healthier foods. But, says Jeffrey Inman, a marketing professor and researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, anecdotal evidence suggests shoppers can be confused by nutritional labels. “Then I began hearing about these new programs where they would take all of the nutritional facts and information and roll them up into a single number, and there was just something ething intrinsically interesting about bout that.”
So Inman partnered with a Northeast grocery retailer to study the habits of 535,000 shoppers. For the next six months, the stores rolled out a singlenumber grading system called NuVal, which takes the nutritional information from 90,000 products and assigns a score between one and 100 (100 being the healthiest). The scores were then displayed on shelves under products in eight different categories — frozen pizza, tomato products, soup, salad dressing, yogurt, spaghetti sauce, granola bars and ice cream. Inman found that when given the single-number nutritional value, shoppers would make healthier choices and, according to the data, the healthiness of their purchases increased by 21 percent on average. But rolling these rating systems out on a large scale could prove challenging. Inman explains food retailers and manufacturers aren’t likely to pay for something that could affect their profitability. “If I’m in the business of making healthy products, I’m really into this system; but if I’m not, then I probably don’t want to see it.” “What this shows is that these simplified nutritional systems have a positive effect on the healthiness of a shopper’s basket, and that’s a good thing,” Inman adds. “There has been talk that NuVal might turn this into an app. But my fear is that the person who would buy this app is already health-conscious, and it likely wouldn’t reach the people who need it most.”
UZBEK PROMISE
U
ZBEK FOOD IS a recent addition to the local scene that has not yet achieved the cultural cachet of, say, Japanese cuisine in the 1980s or Thai in the ’90s. Combining elements of several cuisines, including Russian, Middle Eastern and East Asian, Uzbek cooking is simultaneously exotic and familiar, a fusion born of geography rather than self-conscious recombination. So we were pretty psyched to learn that a new Uzbek restaurant, Café Diyor, had opened Downtown on Smithfield Street, right by the bridge. Café Diyor has not so much transformed the interior of the former bar in which it’s located as attempted to cover every inch of it. Lavish velvet tapestries adorn the walls, patterned scrims are draped from the tin ceiling and even the booth seats have been covered with colorful fabric. The effect could be evocative of the Silk Road, perhaps, if the lighting were a little dimmer. The menu doesn’t reveal much about the dishes besides their ingredients, but phonemic affinities allowed us to guess at
CDEITCH@PGHCITYPAPER.COM
16
{PHOTO BY HEATHER MULL}
{BY ANGELIQUE BAMBERG + JASON ROTH}
PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER 11.12/11.19.2014
Manti lamb dumplings, lagman soup and samsa meat pastry
relationships between some of them and their derivations. For instance, a dish of salted and spiced cabbage, carrots and pickles, called chim-chi, seemed sure to have some resemblance to Korean kimchee; shashlik was another form of shish kebab; non, like Indian naan, was a kind of bread; and manti, steamed dumplings, adapted the Chinese dumpling tradition to the farm products of Uzbekistan, primarily mutton and lamb.
CAFÉ DIYOR 14 Smithfield St., Downtown. 412-471-1411 HOURS: Mon.-Thu. 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Fri. 10 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sat.-Sun. noon-11 p.m. PRICES: $6-18 LIQUOR: BYOB
Though barely mentioned on the menu, a unifying principle in Uzbek food preparation is dill. Almost without exception, every dish at Café Diyor was heavily sprinkled with this potent herb, to the point of obscuring differences. Chuchvara dumplings were much smaller than
the manti, more like Russian pelmeni. But it took careful tasting to distinguish them by anything but size and sauce. The key differences were that the manti, stuffed with distinct pieces of diced lamb, were dotted with tomato sauce, while the chuchvara, filled with plump little lumps of ground meat, were served with firm, sour cream-like yogurt. We’re a dumpling-loving people, but neither version captured our ardor. Tashkent salad was another story. Angelique in particular felt she could have eaten this, and this alone, for her entire meal and been satisfied. To be clear, it was not a vegetarian dish; little bits of diced beef tongue added substance and savor to a lively mix of peppery radishes and crispy fried onions, their pungency just tamed by cooking but not totally subdued into sweetness. The entire salad was coated in a white, creamy dressing whose subtle tang kept it perfectly in balance with the blend of other flavors. Lagman soup reeled us in with the promise of hand-spun noodles, and these