Now that I’ve put a coda (temporarily) on my postings in the NYC board, I can focus on this new one. I hope to add quite a few meals here.
I asked Jim Kalb why they decided to go to Uzbekistan. He responded, “Jen wanted to go somewhere exotic.” My answer to that question is similar, “Toni wanted to go somewhere exotic.”
my trip to Uzbekistan (combined with my first trip to Kazakhstan) was back in 2008. Unfortunately Advantour switched hotels on us at the last minute when we arrived in Almaty and we had no choice but to take the shitty hotel. Hopefully they don’t do this to people anymore.
I actually went to Shymkent and Turkistan back then and Advantour arranged it as part of my Kazakh itinerary.
Can’t imagine that any of the places I went to back in 2008 would still be around, but do feel free to browse through my blog starting on the first day:
Thank you, Peter. I will check that out.
I crossed into Khiva (from Turkmenistan) and just arrived in Samarkand after a stop in Bukhara. I’m just skimming here as I visited Uzbekistan around 20 years ago - that report disappeared with Chowhound, although of limited use now anyway.
Last visit was essentially 99 versions of Plov with a break for various meats on skewers (I recall the various organ meats being most interesting - heart and kidneys particularly, with occasional fish (I recall sturgeon, but that may be faulty memory)).
This time, everything seems sanitized - cleaner, more hygienic, but somehow almost homogenized. My travel food style now is to try the ‘best’ I can find (with a local emphasis) but it’s been hard to differentiate between different versions. The Somsas (samosas) have been solid and reliable (whether from roadside or restaurant) but all have been bland. Let’s just say that the spicing is ‘subtle’. For my palate, it has been the ‘condiments’ that have given some life to the cuisine. The chilis are ‘very’ mild in my experience. There has been the occasional ‘spiced vinegar’ (initially it looked like an oil & vinegar dressing until I tasted it) which has livened up the food.
I’m speculating that the local places have ensured that the ‘tourists’ are not offended by the food so will give good Instagram (or other) reviews, rather than risking a ‘dislike’.
Almost all my meals have lacked ‘high notes’.
My only highlight so far was the breakfast at Minorai Kalon hotel in Bukhara (my travel arranger’s choice for my accommodation). But that was the day I left, and my search for food the only night (before) I stayed there was not memorable. It’s possible their restaurant also serves ‘good’ food - certainly I’d now make that my choice if I return.
Find it amazing that there are two people on this tiny board travelling in Central Asia at this moment
Here is the Mark Wiens video I sent to @FlemSnopes to help him, which seemed on target (the annoying host was in Uzbekistan the same time as me in 2018) but some of my recommended places and his have closed and Doug is a great researcher on his own.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsSpNxjbsvowsOdhcqwTr4Z1kqC_Y8qQq
We had generally good luck with the small guest houses we chose to stay at, which tended to serve dinner, and eating at Chaikanas -soups salads and samsas normally simple and good.
Tourist oriented restos not so much. I would head for some of the places famous for kebabs If I was there again. Restaurants labeled international are generally for the Russian population, “National” food for uzbek ethnicities.
I’m curious to see whether one still gets the ubiquitous ‘salad’ of tomatoes and cucumbers. During my trip a long time ago that seemed to be the only option available whenever we asked for a salad or vegetable dish.
that achichuk salad is mostly what you will get with minor variations, in simple restaurants but we had eggplant dishes, and bean and cabbage salad also , as well as some fried veg dishes (notablly cauliflower) , mung bean soup (someties offered with beef etc) as well or maybe noodle dishes with eggplant and peppers… The korean places, including market sellers have a lot more salads including the famous carrot salad.
Indeed it is, although some variety has been added. Occasionally there will be peas, often corn niblets and also some sweet peppers.
On several occasions there has also been eggplant/aubergine.
But, in simple terms it’s just a ‘seasonal salad’ - so September is a good time to be here for fresh fruits and vegetables.
we had wonderful peaches grapes and other fruit in october in samarkand - not as pretty as supermarket produce but delicious. many fruits had their biological origin in central asia and there still seem to be more unique varieties there.
speaking of fruits… my trip was in June and it was scorching, but it also meant the fruits were incredibly ripe and juicy. We went to the markets and picked up the juiciest peaches, apricots, melons, mulberries… etc I had ever tasted, thanks to the temperature going above 40C.
they are famous for the melons! i was sorry I dont like them
We’re still more in touring mode than posting mode, but I thought I’d go ahead and post this short video from our lunch today at Besh Qozon, at its original location near the Tashkent TV tower. It is touristy, though the Uzbek tourists greatly outnumber the foreign tourists, but the food is cooked the traditional way, over huge wood fires.
Here the cook is preparing non, the Uzbek bread, using a huge standup wood oven. He steps inside the oven and slaps the dough on the walls inside the oven.
Peter, to respond to your note about Uzbek salads. Yesterday, we ate at Besh Qoron, a huge plov place that is very popular with tourists, with Uzbek tourists greatly outnumbering the foreign tourists. It’s a place that really plays up showmanship – think men stirring 6-feet wide kazans (cast iron pots), surrounded by people snapping photos with their phones – and their adherence to Uzbek food traditions.
All that traditionalism gives the place a bit of an insular feel. Though there are lots of foreign customers, there is no menu and if you ask for one, the server just tells you what to order (if you’re lucky enough to get a server who speaks at least some of the same language you speak). Fortunately, there is an online menu in Russian, which we had studied in advance and had ready to consult on our cellphones.
I’ll report on this meal in more detail later, but I though their listings of salads on the menu would give an idea of the range of “traditional” Uzbek salads, which is still very limited.
Here are the six “salads” available at Besh Qoron (using Google Translate for the Russian):
1 - “Achchik - chuchuk - a snack that becomes an excellent addition to a hearty pilaf”
We did not order this, but from the photo it appears to be only tomatoes and onions, no cucumbers
(2) "Special achchik-chuchuk - “salad with a special aroma and taste”
Again, we did not order this, but from the photo it appears to be just tomatoes and onions. The special achik-chuchuk appears to have some sprigs of an herb that looks like dill or maybe rosemary, plus a spice mixture topping of some sort.
(3) “Sour milk salad - salad of fresh cucumbers, greens and radishes with sour milk.”
From the photo, this looks more like a yogurt soup than a salad, with the vegetables being completely immersed in yogurt
(4) “Suzma - traditional Uzbek sauce from sour milk with fresh herbs.”
From the photo, this appears to a bowl of thick yogurt.
(5) “Marinated assortment - delicious marinated vegetable assortment looks very elegant on the table, reminding of sunny summer and abundance of vegetables.”
This one we did order. It was an assortment of delicious, but fairly mild cucumber pickles in a sauce of red pickle juice
(6) “Chimchi salad, without which it is difficult to do during a meal in our establishment.”
As part of their extensive series of forced exiles of various ethnic groups (including Uzbeks), the Soviets forced around one hundred thousand ethnic Koreans to relocate to Uzbekistan. One of the things we’re curious about is the extent to which Korean cuisine has influenced Uzbek cuisine. So it was very interesting to see kimchi described as an essential element of a meal in a very traditional Uzbek restaurant.
There were three kinds of pickles on the chimchi salad: (a) Pickled cabbage, which was much less fermented than any Korean kimchi I’ve ever had, with not a trace of gochugaru, the Korean red pepper flakes. This was good, but more like a Salvadoran curtido or a German half-sour sauerkraut than Korean kimchi. (b) Pickled cucumbers, which were pretty much the same as the pickles in the marinated assortment. (c) Pickled green tomatoes – these had a real vinegar kick to them, and were delicious, probably the highlight of the meal.
So at least at this one very traditional Uzbek restaurant the range of salads is still very narrow.
Re; Samarkand
I didn’t recognise anything (other than the sights/monuments) from my previous visit 20 years ago.
Had a decent Plov at Hanzade - but not worth a detour.
The rice was pretty good - grains separate and not too oily. The small piece of beef also had decent texture and flavour, but the veggies seemed overboiled and devoid of flavour. But excellent bread.
My 20 year-old recollection was that the veg were crispy - but the possible location of that meal (on the concrete terrace of a cafe overlooking the Registan) has been turned into a park skirted by a 6 lane road!
Or, maybe, Plov today just doesn’t match up to one’s first Plov.
Now on to Tajikistan.
If the vegetables were crispy before, I wonder if you had Andijan-style plov? I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but I understand from our airbnb host that it is the only style of plov that is fried.
Bukhara is a beautiful and historic place, but very touristy. The line of parked tour buses is very long and most of the restaurants are huge places that can (and do) seat large groups. That’s not disqualifying, of course, touristy places can be very good and a lot of fun.
But my wife and I wanted to try somewhere at least a little bit off the beaten track. We found just that in a small place called Kurutobxona Bukhara, which is about a 20-minute walk from the Old City where most of the larger restaurants are. It currently has the highest Google ranking by customers at 4.6 in Bukhara.
The catch is that Kurutobxona is a Tajik restaurant, not an Uzbek restaurant (although Tajik is widely spoken in Bukhara, along with Uzbek and Russian). We asked the receptionist at our fancy hotel (in a 19th century Jewish merchant’s home) about Kurutobxona. He responded that he had lived in Bukhara 16 years and had never heard of this restaurant, and encouraged to eat at one of several other places in the Old City, all large places.
Several of the Google reviews said there were only two dishes on the menu, kurutob and norin (actually, many of the reviews said kurutob was the only dish on the menu). Certainly kurutob and norin are the only dishes the restaurant actually advertises on the sandwich board signs outside its entrance. Kurutob is the national dish of Tajikistan, while norin is (I understand) found throughout Central Asia.
Kurutobxona turned out to be a small, tastefully decorated place (complete with a Tajik flag) that seated about 20.
When we were seated, there was a QR code that brought up a menu on Telegram. I only glanced at it, but it appeared that there were more than two items on the menu. It did not matter since we knew what we wanted - the house specialties of kurutob and norin. He even asked whether we wanted the “horse powder” with the norin; we had no idea what that was, but said “yes.”
Many Google reviews mentioned that the portion sizes were large, so I used Google Translate using English-to-Tajik to ask whether we could get half portions of the kurutob and norin. The server seemed to have great difficulty reading the Google translation, but finally said that yes, we could. In fact, we did get a half-portion of the norin, but a full portion of the kurutob, but I counted that as a victory, given the waiter’s limited English and our non-existent Tajik, Uzbek, and Russian.
However, the server was at great lengths to make sure we understood that the norin was made with horse. We kept insisting that we did, and when we finally accepted that he broke into a big smile and asked if he could take our photo (which we agreed to and then returned the favor). His patience with us and good humor made our server at Kurutobxona by far our favorite server in Uzbekistan so far.
I had assumed that our waiter’s struggles with Google Translate was due to problems with the translation algorithm. Google produces some truly ludicrous results when translating to and from Uzbek and I assumed the same was probably true with Tajik. But after our while our server hesitantly said, in English, “This Tajik, I speak Uzbek.” So I switched to Uzbek and things went much more smoothly after that.
I would apologize for all this buildup about the ordering process, but that really is a major part of food exploration in Uzbekistan for those who don’t speak Russian, Uzbek, or Tajik. Unless you confine yourself to tourist-oriented places where the servers are fluent in English, you will encounter serious communication difficulties and, in many cases, servers who aren’t very interested in helping you solve those difficulties.
Now to the food. The kurutob was a revelation, completely unlike anything I’ve ever had before. It consists of torn up pieces of bread, drenched in yogurt and big bits of very sour yogurt, topped with a layer of oil, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, and a couple of tablespoons of fresh dill, with a couple of whole red and green hot peppers. Some of the Google reviews had suggested leaving off the layer of oil, but that would have been a mistake. The lamb was cooked very well done, which is not ordinarily my preference, but moistened with the oil and some of the yogurt, it was very tasty and not dry at all.
My wife was the primary taster of the kurotob. I’m fairly severely lactose intolerant and, although sometimes yogurt does not bother me much, eating a whole bowl of yogurt seemed unwise. So I just ate a few pieces of the lamb, the vegetables, and more pieces of the unbelievably good yogurt-soaked bread than was probably wise. But I did not eat it like a soup, as Toni did. She absolutely raved about how wonderful the dish was, with the thick yogurt, dried yogurt, vegetables, and oil all mixed together.
Norin consists of very thin noodles made of wheat flour, so thin that they resemble bean sprouts more than noodles, topped with a slice of cured horsemeat, heavy on salt, pepper, and cumin, plus crumbled ground horsemeat (the “horse powder”), a side bowl of horsemeat broth, and a bowl of delicious crunchy layered bread (the best bread we’ve had in Uzbekistan). Our server showed us how to eat the norin – you take a piece of bread, soak it in the horsemeat broth to soften it, and then use that to scoop up the noodles and horsemeat.
The norin was very good, not the revelation that the kurutob was, but something I’d happily order on a regular basis.
All in all an excellent meal, made even more fun by our patient waiter. So if you’re in Bukhara and want a break from plov, I highly recommend Kurutobxona Bukhara.
I think these two dishes are probably pretty hard to find in the US. I did some searching among NYC restaurants and a 2018 NYT review of Cafe Dushanbe in Sheepshead Bay said it was probably the only restaurant in NYC serving kurutob. But Cafe Dushanbe is now out of business and in a few minutes of poking around the internet I didn’t find anywhere else in NYC that serves kurutob.
I did find that Tashkent Supermarket has norin among its takeout buffet offerings, and I suspect that there are Uzbek restaurants that offer it as well. But the Tashkent Supermarket version is made with beef and I’d be surprised if there are any NYC restaurants offering an authentic horsemeat version.
I would have thought you were getting mutton/lamb in your plov and not beef, but maybe things have changed these days. I myself would always prefer the famed “fat bottomed sheep” from the region because that amazing fat from their butts was just incredibly delicious. And definitely don’t remember the veg in the plov being crispy.
We have not seen any beef plov here. We also have not had any plov with the big gobs of tail fat from the famous fat bottomed sheep yet. All the mutton fat we’ve seen in plov has been finely diced.
Back in July, my wife and I really liked the plov with the big gobs of fat at Urgut Osh Markazi in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn, though I doubt they had fat from fat bottomed sheep. Interestingly, we had more communication problems there than at any restaurant we’ve eaten at in Uzbekistan so far.
I feel almost guilty mentioning the prices at Kurutobxona, given how the exchange rate must be slamming Uzbekistan, but this place like most places in Uzbekistan is remarkably affordable for Americans. For a full portion of kurutob, a half-portion of norin, and a big pot of strong black tea, we paid 170,000 soum (including tax and tip). That’s a little less than $14 USD.
