The Observer
Kieran Morris set off by bus up Shooters Hill into the Kentish hinterlands on a pilgrimage to ‘the UK’s first Kazakh restaurant’, where he found “a cuisine shaped by 7,000km of geography: a few core Kazakh and Persian dishes, but then a Soviet layer, a Tatar layer, an Uzbek, Tajik and Uyghur layer, touches of Turkish and Chinese… a cuisine that absorbed everything the Silk Road carried, which for 2,000 years was the whole world.”
Plov – a distant cousin to pilaf and paella, and famous throughout central Asia – was spiced with cardamom and cinnamon; it had a “satisfying sweetness”, although Kieran reckoned “it could have been greasier”. Beshbarmak (meaning ‘five fingers’), the national dish, was a “pleasingly basic” lamb and onion stew served over thick hand-sliced noodles and topped with a “nomadic delicacy” called qazi, a gamey horsemeat sausage.
“If you want to eat something you’ve never eaten before, in a part of the city you may never have been to, it’s places like Turkistan that make the capital feel bigger than you thought it was.”
Kieran Morris - 2026-05-03