Qebaptore Kalaja

Though this venue is closed — it opened and closed twice, in fact, over the course of a year — I'm freshening this post nonetheless. Almost everything at this qebaptore was shpije, which is to say, the bread was brought in from an Albanian bakery in Connecticut, but the ground beef sausages called qebapa (you may know them as cevapi), the gullash, and the desserts were homemade (shpije).

Kalaja — "castle," though the retinue on my visits was less grand than that name would suggest — was run by Albanians from Kosovo, a landlocked entity bordering Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia and recognized as an independent country by all but the last. To little surprise, many other items in my slideshow bear strong resemblance to their counterparts from the former Yugoslavia. I would love to think that, after two openings and closings, the third time would be the charm.

Qebaptore Kalaja
2132 Cruger Ave. (near Lydig Ave.), Bronxdale, Bronx

Comments

[Petercherches.blogspot.com]

"qebapa (you may know them as cevapi)"

I hadn't thought about this before, but this suggests that the name cevapi comes from kebab.

[Dave Cook]

Or perhaps the two words share a common root. They do look related.