My wife and I are in Tashkent on our first day of a 15-day trip to Uzbekistan, which will primarily be in Tashkent. We would love to hear suggestions of where to eat. I am very interested in not only traditional Uzbek places, but also foreign cuisines that have evolved to fit Uzbek tastes (as Chinese places, for example, do all over the world).
I am also interested, but less so, in foreign cuisines that try to be “authentic” representations of their original countries – there seem to be quite a few Italian places here, for example, that try to be authentically Italian. I would be very interested in these places if I were a Tashkent resident or an expat on a long-term stay, but for a short-term visit I am more interested in food that you can’t easily get elsewhere.
Tonight, for our first meal, we didn’t have a lot of energy and opted for Abi Doner, which is a short walk from where we are staying. It was very good, with meat sliced from a giant skewer (and strikingly inexpensive), but it was notably much simpler – just meat, bread, and rice, with no sandwiches and few sauces – than the doner places we’ve eaten at in Istanbul, Antalya, and Germany.
I wonder if Tashkent restaurants featuring foreign cuisines tend to simplify and de-spice them to fit Uzbek tastes?
While I am far from an expert in central Asian food, I do have some experience with Central Asian cuisine in the US – a couple of Uzbek meals in Brooklyn, a fabulous “pan-Central Asian” meal at Laghman Express in Brooklyn, scores and scores of Afghan and Uyghur meals (the DC area, where I live, tends to get lots of restaurants from countries with refugees from war and oppression), and one memorably bland Mongolian meal (a huge bowl of beef liver soup seasoned with, as best I could tell, only salt and maybe a dash of pepper).
