The best way to enter the Albanian restaurant Cka Ka Qellu, if not the most direct, starts on Arthur Avenue. Arrive before the fish shops along this famous, not-quite-faded Italian strip in the Bronx take in the iced clams and octopus for the night. Across from Dominick’s, turn into the indoor market that Fiorello La Guardia ordered up. Move on past the hand-rolled cigars and the T-shirts reflecting various tenets of Bronx philosophy. Keep going beyond the scamorza, the soppressata and the ready-to-go heroes, and walk out the door on to Hughes Avenue. Just to the right is a spinning wheel that looks old enough to have been Rumpelstiltskin’s and next to it, another door. Open it, walk inside.

The short trip seems to have taken you back in time. The spinning wheel turns out to be just one piece in Cka Ka Qellu’s collection of antique tools, stringed instruments, yokes, brass coffee mills, manual typewriters, dishes of hammered metal and embroidered costumes that the owner, Ramiz Kukaj, brought over from the old country. Some, he says, go back to the 18th century. The floors and walls seem to have been airlifted from an Albanian farmhouse, and the speakers play wistful folk tunes on traditional instruments, not the modern, globally aware wake-up calls of the brass band Fanfara Tirana. The restaurant is soaked in nostalgia.

The other reason for the walk from Arthur Avenue is that it recapitulates a pattern that’s repeated throughout this neighborhood, where the signs and menus facing the street are still written in Italian but many of the people in the back rooms, seasoning the sausages and frying the veal cutlets, are Albanian.