What to Eat in Kyrgyzstan: Typical Kyrgyz Food and Specialties
Kyrgyz cooking is as rich and varied as the stunning landscape of this Central Asian country. It is deeply shaped by the nomadic past of the Kyrgyz people and reflects how closely they live with nature and with their animals, especially horses and sheep.
Around 80 ethnic minorities live in Kyrgyzstan (Uzbeks, Russians, Dungans, Uyghurs) and it shows in how varied the food is. Some dishes typical of Kyrgyzstan are typical of the whole of Central Asia - and it is the Dungan and Uyghur specialties such as lagman or ashlam-fu that count among the best things you will taste here. Kyrgyz cooking also shares its Turkic roots with other countries of the language family, including faraway Turkey.
Meat is the backbone of the traditional diet, above all mutton and horse. The fattier, the better. It is often combined with noodles or rice and with vegetables such as carrot, onion and potato. Because of the herding way of life, dairy matters just as much in Kyrgyz cooking - and just about everything here gets fermented, from mare's milk to roasted grain.
The Kyrgyz are famous for their hospitality and love to honor a guest with the best they have. I saw it for myself with the families I stayed with in the Kyrgyz mountains.
Typical Kyrgyz Food
One of the most typically Kyrgyz dishes is beshbarmak, a festive dish of boiled meat (traditionally horse), hand-cut noodles and broth flavored with onion. Traditionally you eat it with your hands.
Another favorite is plov, the Central Asian version of pilaf made from rice, meat and vegetables. Kyrgyz specialties also include manty, big steamed dumplings, most often filled with minced meat and onion (but also pumpkin or potato). Kuurdak, meat fried up with onion and potatoes, is one of the oldest Kyrgyz dishes - simple, but filling.
In the colder months the Kyrgyz warm up with shorpo, a hearty soup of meat and vegetables. It fills you up beautifully and gives you energy. And thanks to the Dungan and Uyghur minorities they also make excellent lagman, hand-pulled noodles with meat and vegetables - I got to watch them being made right at the market in Bishkek.
The Kyrgyz National Dish
The national dish of Kyrgyzstan, the one most often associated with the country, is beshbarmak (the name translates as "five fingers"). The dish embodies nomadic tradition and culture and is deeply rooted in the history and way of life of the Kyrgyz nomads. Its name comes from the traditional way of eating it - with the hands, that is with "five fingers".
There is a rich symbolism to the way beshbarmak is served. A single ram yields twelve cuts of meat on the bone called ustukan and each one has its meaning - the most honored guest gets the head or the haunch, the rest are handed out by age and standing. Handing someone the wrong cut was once a real insult.
Curiously, in neighboring Kazakhstan the same dish is simply called "meat Kazakh style" - the word beshbarmak is Kyrgyz in origin. You can tell the Kyrgyz version by its more finely cut noodles and by the onion sauce chyk.
What to Eat in Kyrgyzstan
- Beshbarmak. The national dish of boiled meat (traditionally horse) and wide hand-cut noodles in an onion broth. The name means "five fingers" - a nod to the way it is traditionally eaten, with the hands.
- Plov. A rice dish with meat, carrot and onion, cooked in a cauldron called a kazan. It is popular right across Central Asia; in Kyrgyzstan it is often served on festive occasions.
- Shorpo. A hearty meat soup with potatoes and vegetables. It warms you in winter, and there is even a cold version with fresh herbs for the summer.
- Manty. Big steamed dumplings filled with minced meat and onion, with pumpkin or with jusai chives. They often come with sour cream.
- Lagman. Hand-pulled noodles with meat, vegetables and spices - served as a soup or fried. The Uyghurs and Dungans brought it to Central Asia.
- Samsa. Baked dough parcels filled with minced meat, onion and spices. A popular street food, baked in a clay tandyr oven and sold at every market.
- Kuurdak. Fried pieces of meat (usually mutton or beef) with onion and potatoes. One of the oldest dishes in Kyrgyz cooking.
- Shashlik. Marinated pieces of meat grilled on a skewer. Popular not just in Kyrgyzstan, but across Central Asia and the Caucasus.
- Boorsok. Fried pieces of yeast dough, one of the staple breads of Kyrgyzstan. At celebrations they are poured out onto the festive cloth, the dastorkon; you eat them with tea or with honey.
- Kazy (chuchuk). A traditional sausage of horse meat and fat, often seasoned with nothing but garlic, salt and pepper. It is served on special occasions as a symbol of prosperity and hospitality.
- Naryn. Finely cut cold noodles with boiled horse meat, the hot broth served separately. A festive dish shared with Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan - a close relative of beshbarmak.
- Kumys. Fermented mare's milk, the traditional drink of nomadic herders and the national drink of Kyrgyzstan. It is slightly alcoholic and locals credit it with healing powers.
- Maksym. A fermented drink made from roasted grain, mildly sour and surprisingly filling. In summer it is sold from street barrels on literally every corner.
- Chalap. A refreshing fermented dairy drink made from the soured milk base süzmö, water and salt. My favorite Kyrgyz milk drink.
- Tandyr nan. Bread baked in a traditional clay oven called a tandyr; in Russian it goes by lepeshka. Bakers mark their loaves with their own stamps, and the bread is never cut - you always tear it with your hands.
- Kaymak. Thick, fatty cream that turns up on the breakfast table and as an ingredient in the dough for kattama. The Kyrgyz pour it over manty as well.
- Kurut. Dried salty balls of soured milk. Nomad provisions that keep for months on end - markets sell it by the big sackful.
- Ashlam-fu. A cold spicy soup of noodles and starch jelly, sharpened with vinegar and garlic. The Dungans brought it to the country and the best is made in Karakol.
- Bozo. A thick fermented drink made from millet or corn, mildly alcoholic. It is made mostly in winter and the recipe passes down through families for generations.
- Zharma. A grain drink of roasted flour and talkan, a close relative of maksym - but served hot and unfermented, mainly in the cold months.
- Talkan. Roasted ground grain, the base of many Kyrgyz dishes and drinks. It gets stirred into milk, kumys or clarified butter as a high-calorie snack for herders.
- Oromo. Thin dough filled with minced meat, potatoes or pumpkin, rolled up and steamed. The name means "rolled up" and it is a favorite at family gatherings.
- Kattama. A layered bread of yeast dough folded with butter and spring onion, fried in a pan until golden. Great with tea and with soup.
- Dymdama. Meat braised with cabbage, potatoes, carrot and peppers in its own juices in a sealed cauldron. A summer dish of the farming regions all over Central Asia.
- Ganfan. A Dungan dish of rice, meat and vegetables - essentially lagman, only served with rice instead of noodles. Popular in the cities.
- Chak-chak. Fried pieces of dough stuck together with honey. A sweet of Tatar origin that has made itself at home in Kyrgyzstan and is prepared for festive occasions.
- Zhent. A sweet made from talkan, clarified butter, honey, raisins and nuts. Traditionally served to celebrate the birth of a child.
- Walnuts from Arslanbob. The mountains in the south of the country hold the largest natural walnut forest in the world. There the nuts come with honey and homemade preserves alongside black tea.
- High-mountain honey. White honey from the At-Bashy valley has repeatedly been named the best honey in the world. It owes its taste to hundreds of species of mountain nectar plants.
- Kuiruk-boor. Boiled sheep's tail fat with liver, cut into slices. A ceremonial delicacy the host serves to the most honored guest.
- Dried apricots from Batken. The Batken region in the southwest is famous throughout the country for its apricots. You buy them dried at the markets, next to mountains of other dried fruit and nuts.
Typical Kyrgyz Drinks
The traditional drinks of Kyrgyzstan reflect the nomadic heritage and the ingenuity of the people here. They rely on clever fermentation, which keeps the drinks good for longer.
It all starts with tea, though. Tea is the first thing your host puts in front of you in Kyrgyzstan and the last thing you say goodbye over. It is drunk all day long and the cup is never filled up - only a third of the way, so that the host can keep topping it up hot and keep paying you attention. As the local joke has it: "The greater the respect, the less tea in the cup."
Among the most interesting drinks is kumys, the Kyrgyz national drink made from fermented mare's milk. Kumys holds a special place in Kyrgyz culture and is prized for its taste as much as for its supposed healing properties. I have to admit, though, that kumys is one of the few local specialties I never took to - that smoky, sour taste really is for the brave.
Another popular Kyrgyz drink is maksym, a filling drink made from fermented grains such as wheat, barley or corn. The mildly sour drink is packed with nutrients. Shoro, the company that first started making it by machine in 1992, sold its first 80 liters in two hours - today you run into its maksym stands on every corner in summer.
Chalap is a refreshing drink made by mixing the soured milk base süzmö with water and salt. It is especially popular in the summer months for its cooling effect. Mix chalap and maksym together and you get aralash - and that is the Kyrgyz drink I like best of all, just like plenty of locals.
In winter the Kyrgyz warm up with hot zharma made from roasted grain and with bozo - a thick, mildly alcoholic brew of fermented millet whose recipe families pass down through the generations.
For something stronger, Kyrgyz beer is worth a try - the Arpa brand traces its line back to the first brewery in Central Asia, founded in 1906 - along with Kyrgyz cognac, which has been produced in Bishkek continuously since the 1960s. In summer you also come across tankers of Russian kvass in the streets.
How to Enjoy Kyrgyz Food to the Fullest
Kyrgyz cooking reflects a nomadic heritage and a knack for improvising in harsh natural conditions. If you want to get the most out of it, here are a few of my tips and recommendations.
- Taste freshly milked mare's milk. It tastes markedly different from cow's milk. If you get the chance to buy it straight from nomads in the mountains, do not hesitate - you will not get it fresher anywhere.
- Do not shy away from the fermented drinks. Besides kumys I would recommend trying maksym (fermented grain), chalap (fermented milk) and their mix aralash. If you still have room, give winter bozo or kvass a go.
- Accept an invitation to share a table. Eating in Kyrgyzstan is a social affair; family and guests gather around the spread cloth, the dastorkon. Bread is never cut, only torn by hand, and it is never put down upside down - local belief has it that this would drive prosperity out of the house. Do not turn down a piece of bread your host offers you, it is a sign of respect.
- Visit the local markets. Bishkek's famous ones are Osh and Orto Say. You often get to see the food being made - that is how I got to watch noodles for lagman being pulled by hand. It was a fantastic experience!
- Go to an authentic restaurant. If you want Kyrgyz cooking with a more Western level of comfort, head for Navat or Supara, which recreates a traditional nomad camp. Navat is where I tasted the festive dishes beshbarmak and naryn.
- Enjoy the Kyrgyz tea ritual. Tea comes with every meal and drinking it is an important ritual. Do not be in a hurry, let them top you up little by little and take it for what it is - looking after a guest.
- Understand how the Kyrgyz feel about horse meat. Once you have seen the Kyrgyz countryside with its beautiful horses roaming free, it can be hard to understand how the Kyrgyz can eat horse meat. It helps to understand their hard herding life - the horse carried the nomad and in the worst times it fed him too.
How to Say Thank You for Kyrgyz Food
You can get by in Russian in Kyrgyzstan without any trouble and everyone understands "spasibo". Say thank you in Kyrgyz, though, and you will earn a noticeably warmer smile - it shows respect for the local language and culture.
The basic one is "рахмат" (rakhmat) - thank you. To thank someone more emphatically, say "чоң рахмат" (chong rakhmat) - many thanks. The answer will most likely be "эч нерсе эмес" (ech nerse emes) - you're welcome.
The Kyrgyz themselves go a step further after a festive meal: the eldest guest says a full blessing over the host, called a bata - something like "May your health be strong and your dastorkon always full." Nobody expects that of a visitor, of course - rakhmat is plenty.
The Best Kyrgyz Food
If I had to pick three personal favorites, the best Kyrgyz food for me is:
- Plov. Rice, meat, carrot and chickpeas out of a single cauldron - a perfect combination as far as I am concerned, whether in a restaurant or cooked in a kazan up in the mountains.
- Samsa. I could never resist buying a freshly baked samsa out of a tandyr oven at the Bishkek markets.
- Tandyr nan. Bread still hot from the baker at the Orto Say market is one of my strongest taste memories of Kyrgyzstan.
Interesting Facts About Kyrgyz Food
- A prehistoric underground oven is still in use. Tash kordo (таш кордо) is one of the oldest Kyrgyz dishes, originally hunters' food. Meat from a young ram or a kid goat is baked in a pit lined with red-hot stones; the pit is covered with a lid and buried over to hold the heat. These days tash kordo is made at celebrations and in restaurants as well.
- Kumys is still used as a cure in Kyrgyzstan. Kumys is not just a drink - in the Suusamyr valley, at 2,200 meters, there is a sanatorium where the kumys cures run only during the mare-milking season, from the end of May to the end of September.
- The horse sausage kazy is a symbol of prosperity. The horse meat sausage is served at the biggest celebrations and counts as one of the greatest Kyrgyz delicacies. It is made from the meat, the fat and the horse's intestines.
- Kurut was the nomads' answer to canned food. Dried balls of soured milk keep for months even in the heat - herders carried them in their saddlebags as emergency rations for long journeys.
- The cold soup ashlam-fu has its own capital. The soup comes from the cooking of the Chinese Dungan minority, and the best is said to be made in Karakol in the east of the country - there is even a whole alley there devoted to nothing else. I wanted to taste ashlam-fu as close to Karakol as I could, and I managed it!
- The Kyrgyz yurt is on the UNESCO list. The traditional craft of building a yurt was inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage in 2014. A night in a yurt is also the surest route to homemade kumys - tried and tested by Lake Son-Kul.
- The world's largest beshbarmak was cooked in Bishkek. In 2018 cooks there prepared a portion weighing 1,464 kilograms from the meat of eight horses, beat the Kazakh record and made it into the Guinness World Records.
- The largest walnut forest in the world grows in Kyrgyzstan. The forests around the village of Arslanbob in the south of the country cover hundreds of thousands of hectares and some of the trees are over a thousand years old. Legend has it that Alexander the Great took the walnut back to Europe from here.
- The nomads have their own culinary games. The World Nomad Games, founded by Kyrgyzstan, include a competition in cooking traditional dishes - cooks from all over the world make beshbarmak or kuurdak in cauldrons and on red-hot stones.
Enjoy Kyrgyzstan and the best Kyrgyz food!
Tandyr Nan: The Central Asian Bread Baked on an Oven Wall
Tandyr nan is a Central Asian leavened flatbread that bakers slap onto the hot inner wall of a clay oven to bake. A stamp called a chekich gives it a thin, patterned center, and the oven's heat takes care of the puffy rim on its own. In Kyrgyzstan it's on the table at every meal; it's torn by hand, never cut with a knife, and never laid pattern-side down.
Plov: Rice, Meat, and Carrots from a Central Asian Kazan
Plov is rice cooked in a cauldron called a kazan: first meat, onion, and carrots are fried in fat to make a base called zirvak, then the rice goes on top and nobody stirs it again. All of Central Asia cooks it, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan both claim to be its birthplace, and in Kyrgyzstan it goes by the name paloo. It's one of the dishes of honor - cooked for guests and for celebrations, sometimes for half the village at once.
Shashlik: Grilled Meat on a Skewer
Shashlik is meat grilled on a metal skewer and marinated mainly in onion - in Kyrgyzstan usually lamb or mutton, and in the south of the country threaded with fatty kurdyuk in the Uzbek style. The name comes from the Crimean Tatar şişlik, and the Russian Empire spread it across Central Asia. It's served with flatbread and onion pickled in vinegar.
Naryn: A Festive Kyrgyz Dish
Naryn, a traditional and popular dish throughout Central Asia, holds special significance in Kyrgyzstan as a symbol of hospitality and family values. It is made from boiled horse meat cut into thin strips, served with cold noodles and hot broth. Naryn is often prepared for festive occasions as a sign of respect for guests. Although it is a Kyrgyz specialty, the dish is also enjoyed in other Central Asian countries.
Samsa: Central Asia's Tandyr-Baked Meat Pastry
Samsa is a baked pocket of unleavened dough filled with meat, onion and tail fat, shared by all of Central Asia. Its name comes from Persian, and it tastes best straight from the clay tandyr oven, where it bakes stuck to the inner wall. The shape changes with the region and even the bakery: in Osh it tends to be round, in Kazakhstan triangular, and at a Bishkek bazaar it looks like a spindle.
Chalap: A Salty Kyrgyz Drink Made from Fermented Milk
Chalap is a salty Kyrgyz drink made from süzmö, a fermented dairy base, thinned with cold water. In summer, vendors in Bishkek pour it right on the street from barrels and ice-filled bowls, but you can also buy it bottled in supermarkets. Related drinks turn up all over Central Asia; compared with the thicker Turkish ayran, chalap is thinner, slightly sour and refreshing.
Maksym: Traditional Fermented Roasted Grain Drink
Maksym is a traditional Kyrgyz fermented drink made from roasted grains. Its history dates back to the nomadic lifestyle of the Kyrgyz people. They loved it for its taste, durability, and healing properties. Maksym has a refreshing, slightly sour taste and is rich in vitamins, minerals, and probiotics.
Kumys: Traditional Fermented Mare’s Milk Drink
Kumys is a traditional fermented drink made from mare's milk. The production of this beverage is not easy. Kumys has a distinctive sour and slightly alcoholic flavor, also influenced by the smoke from herbs used to disinfect the containers. Locals believe in its medicinal properties, and it is said to have a positive effect on digestion, immunity, and vitality.
Navat Restaurants: Authentic Kyrgyz Cuisine in Bishkek
Navat restaurants are a popular chain in Bishkek, offering authentic Central Asian, and particularly Kyrgyz, cuisine. The interiors are richly decorated, evoking the atmosphere of the ancient East. With a focus on tourists, the restaurants maintain a high standard of service, with quick meal preparation and professional staff. Navat restaurants are an excellent place to enjoy expertly prepared traditional Kyrgyz dishes combined with a Western style of service.
Kazy: Central Asian Horsemeat Sausage
Kazy is the festive sausage of the Turkic peoples from Central Asia to the Volga region: horse rib meat with its fat goes into the casing whole, unground, usually seasoned with nothing but salt, pepper and garlic. In Kyrgyzstan it's more often called chuchuk, and it comes to the table as an appetizer or with beshbarmak. Fresh kazy is boiled, the kind made to keep is dried - and at Bishkek's Osh Bazaar you can even watch it being made.