Çka Ka Qëllu – the museum room that cooks "whatever's on hand"

Behind the roll-down gates of the Arthur Avenue Retail Market, on a quiet stretch of Hughes Avenue in the Bronx's Belmont section, Çka Ka Qëllu serves a cuisine that almost no other New York address claims outright: Albanian and Kosovan home cooking built on charcoal grills, clay-pot stews and tangy yogurt sauces. On a quiet side street behind the market, the dining room looks less like a restaurant than a small private museum. Owner Ramiz Kukaj, who came to the United States from Kosovo in the mid-1990s, opened the restaurant in 2017 after his son asked him where he could take friends for Albanian food and there was no good answer in the city. The name translates loosely as "whatever we have on hand." It is Selected in the MICHELIN Guide, a listing it has held for the last two years, and for the last four it has appeared on The New York Times' list of the city's 100 best restaurants – a rare run for a family dining room two streets off Arthur Avenue.

01The room and the setting

The dining room is built to be looked at as much as dined in. Glass cases hold regional folk dress from Kosovo and northern Albania, and sepia-toned photographs line the brick walls; servers move between the tables in embroidered tunics. Kukaj spent years collecting 18th- and 19th-century Albanian artefacts to fill the space, turning the restaurant into one of the more unusual restaurant-and-museum hybrids in the city – a room that, as regulars note, feels staged on a first visit and lived-in by the time dessert arrives.

The restaurant also keeps a small terrace, useful on the afternoons when the foot traffic spilling out of the Arthur Avenue Market fills the sidewalk outside. Inside, the energy is unhurried rather than loud – this is not a high-turnover room, and conversation carries easily across the tables.

02The owner

Ramiz Kukaj opened Çka Ka Qëllu in late 2017 after his son asked him where he could take friends for Albanian food, and Kukaj had no answer to give him. He turned the gap into a project, building the menu from recipes collected from the 18th and 19th century and cooked the way Albanians used to cook, rather than reworking the cuisine for a wider audience. Kukaj had arrived in the United States from Kosovo in the mid-1990s; the business that followed has since grown into a small group, with rooms in Manhattan and Stamford, Connecticut, and, most recently, its first New Jersey location in Westwood.

Insider tip

Reservations recommended for groups; open daily noon to 10pm as of October 2026.

03The cooking

Çka Ka Qëllu describes its own kitchen as a modern take on popular Albanian and Kosovan dishes and desserts, built on fresh ingredients and the Mediterranean flavours that run through Balkan cooking – grilled meats, clay-baked tava dishes, and bread that arrives warm and gets refilled without being asked. The menu runs across eight sections: appetizers, soups, salads, savory delicacies, tava clay dishes, seafood, grill and desserts. Most of the Kosovar-owned kitchens along this stretch of Belmont, Çka Ka Qëllu included, cook within the mainly Muslim culinary tradition of Albania and Kosovo, which shows up in a menu built around lamb, veal and chicken rather than pork.

04What to order

Start with the dips – ajvar, a roasted red pepper and eggplant spread, or the sesame baked cheese finished with a honey glaze – before the mantia, crisp baked veal dumplings served with yogurt. The tava kosi, lamb baked in a creamy yogurt-and-egg custard, and the sarma, cabbage leaves stuffed with ground veal, rice and herbs, are the dishes the dining room returns to most. For the table, the Tradita Mixed Grill Platter combines qebapa, qofte, sausage, chicken and liver, while the Skenderbeg – named after the Albanian national hero Gjergj Kastrioti Skënderbeu – is a breaded veal filet mignon roll stuffed with cheese and smoked meat. Finish with baklava or the Albanian trileqe, a cake soaked in three milks and topped with caramel cream.

05The neighbourhood

The Bronx holds one of the largest populations of ethnic Albanians outside Albania itself, concentrated in Belmont, the same few blocks long known as the Bronx's Little Italy. Çka Ka Qëllu sits right behind the Arthur Avenue Retail Market, within walking distance of the Italian salumerias and bakeries that gave the strip its original name, and of the newer wave of Albanian and Kosovar-owned cafés and grills that have opened around it since the 1990s.

06When to go and booking

In October 2026 the restaurant's own site lists hours as Monday to Sunday, noon to 10pm, with reservations bookable directly through the website. Pricing runs to a moderate spend by New York standards, and the restaurant takes credit and debit cards. Calling ahead is sensible for larger groups, given the scale of a neighbourhood dining room that has, in recent years, become considerably harder to walk into unannounced.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.