“Dungan cuisine” says the sign, without fanfare, on a drowsing street. The address is just off Sheepshead Bay Road, not far from the waterfront in southern Brooklyn. Once the space was home to an Azerbaijani restaurant, one of many outposts in the neighborhood with roots in the former Soviet Union.

Now it is Lagman House, likely the first and only restaurant in the city to offer the food of the Dungans, Chinese Muslims descended from seventh-century Arab and Persian Silk Road traders who married Han Chinese. In the late 19th century, thousands of them fled China after the government’s brutal suppression of a Muslim uprising. Ten million lives were lost, one of history’s highest wartime death tolls.

The Dungans’ escape route went through the Tien Shan mountains in deep winter; many died on the snowy passes. On the other side lay Imperial Russia, where they found refuge in what is today Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Among them were the great-grandparents of Damirzhan Azimov and his wife, Gulshat Azimova, who grew up in the village of Zhalpaktobe in southern Kazakhstan, immigrated to the United States in 2012 and opened Lagman House in June.

This is how the world unfolds in New York City: Turn a corner, and there’s a portal to another hemisphere, a glimmer of a different life.