Why Peckham needs a Kyrgz restaurant

Yesterday Matt and I had a pasty and a cup of tea for lunch. Mmm, I thought, as I burnt my tongue on the filling: how nice to be so far from home.

In London I eat pretty healthily and mostly veggie. I haven’t let a Cornish pasty past my lips since 1997. When abroad, I gobble anything and everything. I’m not interested in going to fancy restaurants (unless someone else is paying). I want to eat with the locals. If there’s a queue for a grimy hole-in-the-wall serving greasy snacks, I’m there.

I didn’t know much about Central Asian cuisine (ok, I didn’t know much about Central Asia full stop – that was the appeal). Would the years of Russian and Soviet rule mean borscht and lashings of dill? (Yes to the dill.) Would the food be infused with Chinese or Iranian influence?

As it turns out, Kyrgz people have a few staples in common with Brits.

1. For starters, they consume copious quantities of tea. Depending on which part of the country you’re in, it’s either black or green (no milk – unless you’re in a shepherd’s yurt), and it’s always served in style. We’ve stayed with families that have no running water or mains electricity, but you can guarantee there will be a beautiful china teapot and dinky patterned bowls instead of cups.

2. Biscuits. Every meal, including breakfast, is accompanied by a plate piled high with biscuits and sweets. In recent years, we Brits have spurned the humble biscuit in favour of beetroot crisps and goats cheese and peppermint-flavoured popcorn. Kyrgyzstan has reacquainted me with the simple joy of dunking. No matter how small the village shop, how empty the shelves, there will be crates of biscuits which you buy by the kilo.

3. On our first day here, we had the first of many samsas, from a dusty stall by the bus stop (Matt was getting hangry). The plump pasties were swaddled in blankets to keep them warm, and turned out to be the Kyrgz cousin of the Cornish pasty – made with lamb, onions and a dash of gristle. There are tandoori ovens pumping out samsas on every other street corner. (The other popular snack is a cold wodge of deep-fried potato. Matt’s had a few to double-check he doesn’t like them.)

And a few reasons why I’m looking forward to a Kyrgyz pop-up opening in Peckham. One probably already has…

Jam

With breakfast, lunch and tea. One woman told me that without jam, you cannot receive guests; it would be rude. Even in shepherds’ yurts, it’s homemade, full of fruit (and sometimes stones), and served in dainty glass dishes.

Kuruts

Solidified, very sour yoghurt balls. They can be as big as golf balls or as small as marbles. Matt doesn’t like the fact that they suck all the moisture out of your mouth, but I’ve been stocking up – I like food that makes me cry a little.

Manti

The Kyrgz adore a fat steamed dumpling. The ones below are pumpkin.

Oromo

The manti’s gluttonous, lewd big sister. It’s a kind of ginormous dumpling crossed with a strudel, filled with layers of buttery potato. Pure stodge.

Plov

An Uzbek dish, popular in southern Kyrgyzstan where there’s a big Uzbek population. It’s a mountain of rice cooked in a mutton broth so it’s deliciously fatty. If you manage to finish your plate, you look and feel like a mountain of plov for at least 12 hours.

MSG

“This is good,” I marvelled, tucking into a bowl of noodles and potatoes and little else. “It’s the monosodium glutamate,” another tourist explained, marvelling at the clueless Brit. “They love it here. You can buy huge tubs in the supermarket.” And who wouldn’t, when you live on a desert plain and the single shop within 150km only sells biscuits and vodka? I don’t have that excuse but might bring a tub home anyway. I wasn’t allowed Chinese takeaways as a kid and I clearly missed out.

Dispensing with chairs

Eating at knee-height is so much more intimate somehow.

But there’s one dish I wouldn’t order again: beshbarmak…

Horsemeat noodles

Not because I felt pangs of remorse seeing herds of elegant, glossy horses roaming the Ala-Too Mountains. Not even because horses are my 6-year-old niece’s favourite animal (sorry Alice).

Not because beshbarmak means “five fingers” and you’re supposed to eat it with your hands – messy as the noodles were swimming in broth (Matt ignored tradition, above).

It was just a bit bland.

Later I learned that horsemeat is a delicacy, a dish for special occasions. It’s expensive and usually eaten fresh. We met a young man who is getting married next year and will give his father-in-law a horse and five sheep for the wedding feast. That’s a lot of meat.

But the Kyrgz never eat cheap, frozen horsemeat burgers. Maybe we’re not that alike after all.

*Belatedly uploaded in Dushanbe, where we are enjoying the luxury of wifi, running water and electricity after 9 days in Tajikistan’s Wild East.

**Thrilling Morrisons bag twist also to follow in the next few days...