Just off Piccadilly Circus, on Regent Street, two very different restaurants now sit within a few metres of each other. One is a new-ish all-day Uzbek street food joint OshPaz, where manty and plov are served by ladies in cute, traditional embroidered hats. The other, close by, is a branch of Pizza Hut. One early afternoon in late July, when the world and its grandmother needed lunch after going to see Eros, guess which one had a queue snaking out of the door and which one did not? Yes, clearly the former was Pizza Hut, with its £13.99 a head unlimited “buffet” bundle, complete with access to the “ice-cream factory” with freeflowing Mr Whippy and bubblegum sauce. OshPaz, by comparison, was delightfully underpopulated: walk-ins welcome, solo diners treasured. Bliss.
That’s not by any means a dig at any one who chooses to “hit the Hut” – pizza has its place, after all, especially if you need to feed the kids – but it’s also a reminder that Uzbek cuisine is not at all mainstream. This landlocked Central Asian country has 35 million inhabitants and a worldwide diaspora, but few people in the UK know much about lag-man, samsy pastries and cream-drenched manty. The latter’s lack of wider popularity is especially bewildering, because, well, who doesn’t love a dumpling? OshPaz’s manty have thin, wobbly skins holding beef, chicken or pumpkin seasoned with cumin and coriander. They’re wrapped into delicate, pretty, plump packages and steamed for 40 or so minutes, until they’re ready to serve with carrot salad, soured cream and, if you like, chilli oil.
I can’t vouch for the authenticity or otherwise of dipping an Uzbek manty into Japanese-style chilli oil, but there you go – these manty are, roughly speaking, Middle Eastern koftas inside Chinese xiaolongbao dough. That said, and in a bid to prevent an international incident, I’ll stop blurring precious foodstuffs now. Neither, heaven forbid, will I take a guess at who influenced who here. What I will say, though, is that if you ever fancy losing three glorious hours of life, you could do a lot worse than spend them researching Uzbek plov, in which long-grain white rice merges with chicken or lamb, onion, carrot, raisins, paprika, whole garlic heads and perhaps a few chillies. Let’s avoid a pan-global bunfight over the minutiae of Indian pilau, Pakistani pulao, Afghan pilaf and so on. Which is better? Who ripped off whom? And at what point on the Silk Road circa AD138 did some bright spark first simmer rice with meat and think, “We’re on to a winner here”?
Better, I think, simply to visit OshPaz, pull up a chair or a stool at the counter, order the lamb plov (or the chicken or vegan variety) with fresh achichiq chuchuk (tomato and cucumber salad) and minted soured cream. Sip from a pot of milky masala tea flavoured with honey, cinnamon and ginger, and keep a cool, clear head.
Try the manty, too, and the samsy – buttery, flaky puff pastry enveloping cumin-spiced lamb. Yes, you might find yourself wondering where the samsy ends and the samosa starts, and where the Caribbean patty and the Cornish pasty enter the game. But I don’t have a dog in this fight, merely the appetite of a famished great dane, which comes in handy if you also order the chicken lag-man, or fried noodles in a spicy broth, which are, to my mind, the stars of the show here. The advertised “broth” is nothing of the sort, though. Rather, it is a thick, hearty stew with chunks of pepper, celery, onion and some chilli.
OshPaz is small – I’m calling it a restaurant only due to the smart, uniformed table service, but in truth it’s more a cafe that also does takeaway. Owner Muzaffar Sadykov has worked tirelessly since 2009, when he turned up in the UK, initially to study IT before making it his life’s mission to teach us the joy of Uzbek cooking. He started with various street food stalls and pop-ups across London, then moved on to more semi-permanent bases at Seven Dials Market in Covent Garden and Mercato Metropolitano in Borough. Now he has rocked up here with a bricks-and-mortar site in London’s West End, where he’s not only competing with Pizza Hut, but also St James’ rather more glitzy esablishments.
Yes, the menu is brief – some rice, some noodles, some steamed dumplings and some baked ones – but service is quick and there’s a vegan option for everything. There are no desserts, no limitless candy sprinkles and no buffet with a chicken and sweetcorn pizza congealing under a heat lamp, but what OshPaz does have is huge heart. It may take me a moment to find Uzbekistan on a map, but Piccadilly Circus? Well, even a fool can get there.
