When Zohran Mamdani, the young mayor of New York City, announced he and his wife, artist Rama Duwaji, would take a week’s vacation “upstate,” his staff was careful not to identify the location any further than that. One could imagine any destination one envisaged, from a luxurious hotel suite in Westchester to a rustic isolated cabin deep in the Adirondack woods. Take your choice.
They chose Coxsackie, the second-largest municipality in Greene County with a 2020 census population of 8,382. They were spotted in a number of places, including the Tops grocery store in West Coxsackie, where they were reliably reported to have bought two fried chickens and a copious supply of vegetables.
The couple also went to dinner in at least two other places, according to Emma Goldberg of The New York Times. One was Cafe Susanna in Leeds, where they ate duck and masa dumplings. The other was “an Uzbek restaurant in the area.”
There aren’t that many Uzbek restaurants in the Coxsackie area. There is one, however, near the Hannaford at the Bridgeview Mall in Highland, which is about an hour’s drive south of Coxsackie. It’s called the Alons Uzbek Halal Grill. That’s the one the mayoral party went to.
Mamdani called to say they were coming to dinner 45 minutes from that moment.
Co-owner Sobir Murtazaev, whose wife and partner Nayoba does the cooking, said the mayor was already a good friend.
As everywhere else, patrons and others asked the mayor whether he was who they thought he was, and as everywhere else Mamdani replied that he was.
The police guard stationed himself at an outside table, and Mamdani brought his dinner out to him.
What did they eat? Everything, Sobir Murtazaev responded.
The national dish of Uzbekistan is what we would call pilaf and they call pilov. According to HVOne writer Fran Platt, “Standard pilov ingredients are rice, finely cut carrot and onion, garlic, chickpeas, raisins, peppers and either lamb, beef or chicken.”
The Murtazaevs came to this country when they were winners in an Uzbekistan green-card lottery in 2008, Platt divulged. Like many first-generation immigrants, they have ended up making a living in occupations they weren’t educated for: He was a law student; she was being trained in cosmetology.
The morning of his return to New York City, Mamdani told the local press that he had “bounced around” on his vacation, that he had “missed you guys,” and that he had kept in frequent touch with his city team.
Well, then, what about this imaginary line between downstate and upstate? Fortunately, Albany Times Union columnist Chris Churchill last week provided a Gordian-knot solution to this ever-vexing conundrum. Employing cunning standards like “Is there a Stewart’s nearby?” (upstate) and “Do people smirk when they say Coxsackie?” (downstate), the answer he fashions is a solution and a damned good one, too.
The invisible line east of the Hudson, Churchill decrees, extends from Wappingers Falls over to Hopewell Junction and Pawling. Across the river, it’s north of Newburgh before slicing southward beyond the Thruway.
Another telltale sign: Upstate begins where good pizza ends.
To many an upstate pizzeria, them’s fighting words.