SCHENECTADY — Authentic Afghan cuisine is the focus at Shafi and Karima Rasoully’s new Kabul Night restaurant on Union Street, in the building where the Night Sky Cafe formerly was located.

The Rasoullys have lived in Schenectady for more than a decade and formerly ran the Arizona Pizza restaurant on Barrett Street. Kabul Night offers a fine dining experience, but you’ll also find it lunch-friendly with a daily, inexpensive buffet consisting of an entree and side dishes, including salad and soup.

The decor is quite charming with exotic touches, like native Afghan attire, adorning the walls and a big wooden camel perched in the front window.

Their attractive menu opens with a little essay on the food of Afghanistan and a promise to use only the freshest ingredients and to prepare dishes in the Afghan style. Rice is an important element in Afghan cuisine, and the menu notes that Baghlan Brand rice, “perhaps the finest quality rice available,” is used exclusively at Kabul Night.

My recent visit was for an on-the-fly workday lunch, and I had an enjoyable experience, however brief.

Lamb qormi

On this particular day, the buffet featured a lamb qormi with rice, sauteed spinach, a mixture of vegetables, Afghan noodle soup, a green salad with a house yogurt dressing and a flat bread.

A qormi is a stew usually made with a lot of onions which are sauteed. Then meat, fruit, vegetables and spices are added, along with liquid. As the stew is cooked the onions “melt” and thicken it and the flavor is wonderful. The lamb qormi at Kabul Night was a treat, with lots of tender pieces of lamb and yellow split peas among the ingredients. The accompanying rice was also excellent, not the sticky kind that is served in many Asian restaurants, but separate grains with a wonderful flavor that proved to be a perfect complement to the rich qormi.

The bread was interesting, a flatbread but not thin like naan. It was thicker and more like lepyoshkas, the Uzbek-style flatbread.

I found the noodle soup intriguing — starting with its exotic bouquet. The flat noodles were served in a richly flavored, bright yellow broth spiced with lemon and dill weed and I think turmeric. The taste is quite unexpected, strong but enjoyable.

Some of the cuisine of Afghanistan is similar to that of India — tandoori chicken, for example — and some more Middle Eastern. Kabobs are a major feature at Kabul Night, a variety of lamb and chicken dishes with rice and chutneys.

Appetizers include traditional samosas, little orbs of thin dough filled with spiced peas, potatoes and other vegetables and fried to crispy consistency, served with a cilantro chutney. There’s also kadu borani, slices of sweet and spiced butternut squash topped with yogurt sauce, seasonings and garlic.

Side dishes available include Afghan meatballs — yes, they have meatballs in Afghanistan — and Afghan yogurt with chopped cucumber and mint leaves.

Pasta doesn’t play a big role in Afghan cuisine with the notable exception of dumplings. At Kabul Night you can order ashak, boiled dumplings filled with scallions and spinach and topped with garlic and yogurt sauce, or mantoo, which is steamed dumplings filled with mildly spiced beef and onions and topped with yellow split peas and yogurt, garlic and mint sauce.

Prices are quite reasonable. The most expensive dish I could find on the menu was a manager’s special — a combination of lamb chops, chicken and ground beef kabobs — for $17.95. The lunch buffet is a real bargain. My tab for the buffet and a soda came to $12.76 with tax and tip.

My experience overall was positive and I plan to return soon.

Napkin notes

It’s not a good time to be embarking on a new business venture, and restaurants are particularly notorious for their failure rates. But independently owned places like Kabul Night, especially those offering unique ethnic cuisines, deserve the support of the community, and I’m hopeful the Rasoullys will find that in Schenectady.