For years, Sami Zaman scrambled for a patch of sidewalk where he could stake a pushcart and build a life, coffee by coffee, at 65 cents a cup. The cart’s tin shell boiled in summer and rattled in winter. At last, he capitulated and took to driving a cab, still roaming, never stopping long enough to claim any place as his own.

Now flowers tug skyward from planters outside Sami’s Kabab House in Astoria, Queens, an unexpected wedge of garden between a tax accountant’s office and a laundromat. Mr. Zaman, 49, opened the restaurant in November, transforming an industrial space with wine-dark carpets and embossed ceiling tiles that remind him of the houses in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he grew up.

The menu is brief and unfussy, drawing in part from Mr. Zaman’s ancestry, half-Uzbek, half-Tajik. In his hands, Afghan mantu (dumplings) are smaller-scale, almost demure cousins to hulking Uzbek manti, but still retain a touch of shagginess. Their delicate skins are loosely packed with ground beef, musky from cumin, and just barely pinched shut. They arrive dressed, resting on thick yogurt with an insistent beat of garlic and strewed with more ground beef in sunset slashes of long-broken-down tomatoes and onions.