In the heart of old Brooklyn, on a prosaic stretch of Coney Island Avenue that runs through Midwood, among auto body shops and fast-food joints and commerce catering to Orthodox Jews, you will find what looks like a village house in the old country, with a forest in back and a quaint monastery in the distance.

To many Americans, such a presence may evoke Romania or Poland or some other Eastern European location. Those from the tiny Republic of Moldova would know better. It is a restaurant, succinctly named Moldova; it is the only one dedicated to Moldovan cuisine in New York, and one of only a few outside the Moldovan homeland itself.

Moldova, nestled between Romania and Ukraine, is a landlocked state in the northeast Balkans. It is a picturesque, largely rural nation once known as the garden of the Soviet Union. It also is considered the poorest country in Europe and has one of the highest emigration rates in the world, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Of the tens of thousands of Moldovans who have arrived in the United States since then, relatively few have ended up in New York. One immigration organization estimates that there are around 5,000 Moldovans in the city; Radu Panfil is one.