Uzbek Cuisine: 10 Dishes Every Traveler Should Actually Try

Rice, meat, carrots and onions, cooked in a wide cast-iron kazan over an open fire. The order never changes: the meat and onions are fried first, then the carrots, then the rice goes on top and steams without being stirred. The cook who specialises in it is called an oshpaz. In 2016 UNESCO added the culture and tradition of plov to its list of the intangible heritage of humanity.

Plov is a lunch dish, not a dinner one: the big plov centres cook in the morning and are often sold out by mid-afternoon. At weddings it is served even earlier, as the morning plov, between about 6 and 9 a.m. Every region has its own style; our article on plov in Uzbekistan explains the differences and where to learn to cook it.

Thick hand-pulled noodles with a sauce of meat, peppers, tomatoes and garlic, served either as a soup or as a drier main course. The noodles are stretched by hand, not cut, and in a good kitchen you can watch the cook pull them. If the menu offers both kinds, try the soup in the cooler months and the fried version, without broth, in summer.

Meat grilled on long skewers over charcoal: lamb, beef, chicken, or minced lamb shaped around the skewer. You will smell a shashlik grill before you see it. It is served with raw onion, sometimes sprinkled with vinegar, and a fresh flatbread. The town of Gijduvan near Bukhara is so known for its shashlik that since 2023 «Gijduvan shashlik» has been a registered geographical indication.

A pastry baked, not fried, on the inside wall of a clay tandir oven. The classic filling is lamb and onion; in season you will find pumpkin, potato or spring greens. A good somsa is flaky outside and juicy inside without the filling leaking through, which is the real test of a tandir baker. Every region has its own shape, and the somsa of Sukok, a village in the mountains near Tashkent, became a geographical indication in 2025.

Round flatbread baked in the tandir, thick at the rim and stamped in the centre with a pattern made by a chekich, a tool of pins that keeps the middle flat. Non is served with the decorated side up and broken by hand rather than cut with a knife, and it is treated with real respect at the table. Samarkand non is the most famous: since February 2025 it has been a geographical indication. How bread is baked and the customs around it are in our article on Uzbek bread.

A soup of large pieces of meat, usually mutton, with whole vegetables: potato, carrot, onion, sometimes chickpeas. It cooks slowly, so the broth stays clear while the meat turns tender. It is the dish most likely to start a big meal, and the one we recommend on a cold evening or after a long day on the road.

Layers of meat, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, peppers and tomatoes, cooked slowly in a closed pot in their own juices. It is a home dish more than a restaurant one, built around whatever vegetables the season brings, which makes it one of the best things to eat if you are invited into a family kitchen, for example at a dinner with a local family in Bukhara.

Small dumplings of thin dough with minced meat, much smaller than manti, boiled and served in broth or drained with sour cream or yoghurt. Folding them takes patience, so chuchvara are a dish of family kitchens and teahouses that make them by hand. In spring look for the green version filled with herbs, one of the dishes of Navruz.

A festive Uzbek meal ends with green tea, nuts and halva. There are many kinds, from sesame and nut halva to the famous halva of Kokand, whose name and traditional recipe have been protected as a geographical indication since 2026. Nisholda is lighter: a white, whipped cream of egg whites and sugar flavoured with a root extract, made above all during Ramadan and eaten with bread and tea after the fast.