Uzbek food: bread, plov and the hour that matters

It is heavy: this is a cuisine built on lamb fat, rice, wheat and long cooking, in a country with cold winters and a farming population. It is not repetitive, provided you understand two things. The first is that the same dish is a genuinely different dish in each city, so eating plov four times in four cities is four meals rather than one repeated. The second is that the best Uzbek food is eaten at particular hours in particular places, and if you turn up at a hotel restaurant at eight in the evening you will get the worst version of everything.

Here is how to eat well, what each city does properly, and the honest note about what is overrated.

Plov, and the hour

Plov, palov, osh, is the national dish: rice cooked with lamb, yellow carrot, onion and cumin in a cast-iron kazan over a fire, with the rice absorbing the fat and stock rather than being boiled in water. A good one is not greasy. A bad one is very greasy indeed.

The thing nobody tells visitors is when to eat it. Plov is a lunch dish. It is cooked in the morning in a single enormous kazan, served from about eleven, and when it runs out the place closes. A plov centre at two in the afternoon has scrapings. A restaurant serving plov at nine at night reheated it.

So: go at midday, go where there is a queue of local men, and eat it with the shredded radish salad, achichuk, that is served alongside to cut the fat, and green tea rather than a cold drink.

Plov city by city

Tashkent. Tashkent plov is the showpiece version: rice, lamb, sometimes horse sausage, quail eggs and chickpeas on top, cooked at scale. The Central Asian Plov Centre near the television tower cooks in kazans big enough to bathe in and the theatre of it is genuinely worth seeing. It is touristed and it is still good.

Samarkand. The layered version, and our favourite. The rice is not stirred through the meat and carrot, so it arrives in strata, paler and lighter than the Tashkent version. Served with a whole piece of lamb on top rather than chunks stirred in.

Bukhara. Sweeter, often with raisins and sometimes chickpeas, and a darker rice. The Bukhara version divides people, which is a reason to try it.

Fergana. Where the dish is generally agreed to have come from, made with devzira rice, a reddish local grain that holds its shape and gives the dish its texture. If you are going to Fergana for the craft towns, eat plov there.

Khiva. Less about plov, more about shivit oshi, below.

Bread, which is not a side dish

Non, the round stamped bread baked on the wall of a tandoor, is treated with a seriousness that takes visitors a few days to notice. It is never cut with a knife, it is torn. It is not placed upside down. A stale piece is not thrown away.

And it changes town by town. Samarkand non is the famous one: thick-rimmed, dense, heavily stamped in the middle with a chekich, and it keeps for days, which is why people carry stacks of it onto trains. Bukhara bread is thinner and flakier, sometimes layered with fat. Tashkent’s obi non is softer. Khiva’s is smaller.

Buy it hot from the bakery rather than from a restaurant basket. It costs under a dollar, it is the best value in the country, and watching a baker slap dough onto the inside wall of a tandoor pit is a fine five minutes.

The rest of what to order

Samsa. Baked pastry parcels, lamb and onion or pumpkin, cooked stuck to the inside of a tandoor so the bottom crisps and the fat runs. Best in the morning. The pumpkin ones in autumn are excellent and the meat ones are the default. Under $1.50.

Lagman. Hand-pulled noodles in a broth with lamb and peppers, Uighur in origin and the dish we would eat most often if we lived there. Ask for it fried, kovurma lagman, at least once: the same noodles stir-fried rather than in soup.

Shashlik. Skewers grilled over charcoal, lamb, beef, chicken or minced. Order the lamb rib version if it is on. Every town has a shashlik street that fills at seven in the evening.

Manti. Large steamed dumplings of chopped lamb and onion, eaten with sour cream or a dab of vinegar. Heavy, and better at lunch.

Shivit oshi. Khiva only. Green noodles coloured with a great deal of dill, served under a stewed meat and vegetable sauce with a bowl of yoghurt. It exists nowhere else in the country and it is the single most distinctive dish in Uzbekistan.

Norin. Cold hand-cut noodles with sliced horse sausage. Bukhara and Tashkent. Strange, and worth ordering once.

Dimlama. A layered pot of meat, potato, carrot, cabbage and tomato steamed slowly in its own liquid. The closest thing to a Uzbek home dinner you will get in a restaurant.

Soups. Shurpa, a clear lamb and vegetable broth, at breakfast in a guesthouse in the hills is a better meal than it sounds. Mastava is the rice version.

Fruit, and why September matters

The single most underrated thing about eating in Uzbekistan is the fruit, and it is seasonal in a way that decides which month you should come.

The autumn harvest, from about mid-September through October, brings melons that deserve their reputation, grapes, figs, pomegranates and the new season’s dried apricots and raisins in the bazaars. A market in Samarkand or the Chorsu bazaar in Tashkent in late September is the best food shopping in Central Asia and costs almost nothing.

Spring has its own version: the first apricots, cherries and mulberries in May. Winter has dried fruit and nuts, which are excellent, and very little fresh.

This is one of several reasons the late September fortnight is the one we book most often. The others are in Uzbekistan month by month.

Tea, and the teahouse

Green tea, kok choy, drunk all day and poured back into the pot three times before the first cup is served. The chaikhana, the teahouse, is where a town actually sits: under vines, on a raised platform with a low table, plov at midday and tea for the rest of the afternoon.

The best hour in Bukhara is six in the evening at Lyabi-Hauz, the pool with mulberry trees over it, when the town comes out. You do not need to order much.

Where to eat, by city

Tashkent. The best restaurants in the country by a distance, and the only city with an ambitious modern scene. Also the Chorsu bazaar for samsa and bread, and the Plov Centre at midday.

Samarkand. More limited than you would expect from a city of its fame. Eat plov at lunch, eat at the bazaar, and take one good dinner in a courtyard restaurant in the old quarter.

Bukhara. The most pleasant eating in the country, mostly because of where you eat rather than what: courtyard restaurants in restored merchant houses, the pool at Lyabi-Hauz, and rooftops with the Kalyan minaret lit behind them.

Khiva. Two or three good places inside the walls, shivit oshi at all of them, and dinner on a rooftop as the walls go orange.

The Fergana valley. The best lagman and the best plov, in the plainest rooms.

The Nuratau villages and the yurt camps. Home cooking, eaten with the family, and often the best meals of the trip.

What is overrated

We should say this plainly.

The folklore dinner show. A set menu of mediocre food with a fashion show of chapan coats and a dutar player, staged in a madrasa courtyard. It is sold to every group and it is the worst meal of most people’s trip. Go to the courtyard by day and eat elsewhere.

Hotel restaurant plov. Reheated, greasy and served at dinner. All three problems come from the same cause.

Kazan kabob at scale. Fine when a family makes it. Frequently oily when a tourist restaurant does.

Camel milk and horse sausage as a dare. Both are perfectly ordinary foods here and neither is remarkable. Try them because they are on the table, not because someone told you it was an adventure.

Vegetarians, honestly

Manageable with notice, repetitive without it. The base ingredients are there, and the default assumption in a kitchen is meat, including in the stock under a vegetable dish.

What works: pumpkin samsa, dimlama made without meat, salads, non and cheese, the dairy and fruit at breakfast, and Korean-influenced pickled vegetable salads which are everywhere in the bazaars, a legacy of the Korean population deported to Uzbekistan in 1937. What we do is tell the restaurants and the guesthouses ahead of your arrival, which in this country genuinely changes the meal.

Vegans have a harder time. Say so at the outset and we will build the route accordingly.

Plan this trip

Tell us how you like to eat and we will build the plov stops, the bazaars and the family kitchens into the route rather than leaving them to chance. Free first proposal, no obligation.

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Keep reading

• Uzbekistan: the complete guide to planning your trip
• Uzbekistan for the first time
• Craft and culture, 12 days
• Bukhara or Khiva: which one, if you can only do one
• What does a trip to Uzbekistan cost?
• All our Uzbekistan trips

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