Where to Find Uzbek and Central Asian Food in South Florida

Chayhana Oasis has been introducing South Florida diners to Uzbek cooking for years, and it remains the easiest place to understand what makes this food so comforting.

The room is dressed for the occasion, with Central Asian decorative details and the feeling that dinner should take a while. The menu is broad, but the Uzbek core is easy to find.

Start with samsa. Then order the pilaf, the restaurant's version of plov, built around rice, carrots, chickpeas, raisins, garlic and meat. Add manti or kovurma lagman if there are enough people at the table.

This is not a cuisine that rewards ordering one entree per person and refusing to share. Put everything in the middle.

Grandma's Secret is much smaller and more casual than Chayhana Oasis, and that is part of why we like it.

The restaurant describes itself as an Uzbek and Uyghur kitchen, and the menu gets directly to the good stuff: Tashkent plov, manti, samsa, fried lagman, Uyghur lagman and kebabs.

There is also a family story behind the name. The restaurant has said that many of its Uzbek recipes trace back to the owner's grandmother.

The dish we would build the visit around is the Tashkent plov: aromatic rice with lamb, carrots, onions and chickpeas. Then add the Uyghur lagman if you want to understand how different Central Asian noodles can feel from the noodle soups you already know.

This is the kind of restaurant Omomoom exists to make easier to find.

Sim Sim sits in North Miami Beach with a menu built around Uzbek comfort food and grilled meats, with Turkish and Mediterranean dishes mixed in. The Uzbek side is where we would concentrate.

There is plov. There are manti. There is fried lagman. There are samsa, chuchvara dumplings, shurpa and a long list of kebabs.

In other words, this is a very good place to bring people who have never tried Central Asian food, because nobody has to commit to one thing.

Order several dishes, put them in the middle, tear the bread, pass the dumplings around and let dinner become dinner.

Chayhana Samarkand gives South Florida another version of the Uzbek table: a Glatt Kosher one.

The restaurant is still relatively new and has a smaller review footprint than the older names in this guide, so we would approach it as a discovery rather than pretend there is years of consensus behind it.

But the menu is unmistakably Central Asian. There are samsa, kebabs, soups, dumplings, salads such as achuch-chuck and morkovcha, and the hearty meat-forward dishes associated with Uzbek and Bukharian cooking.

That makes Samarkand especially useful for this guide. Central Asian food in South Florida is not one restaurant and one interpretation. The community is creating different versions of the same food traditions for different diners.