Halal Food in Uzbekistan: What You Need to Know
Halal food in Uzbekistan: why Uzbek cooking is halal by default, where pork and alcohol turn up, the new Halol mark, horse meat, and what to ask in Uzbek.
Mirabad bazaar in Tashkent sits beside the Oybek neighbourhood, where many of the city's Korean families live, and it's known for two things a first-time visitor rarely expects in a Muslim-majority capital: Korean and other Asian groceries in and around the market, and pork. An expat guide to Tashkent's markets describes Mirabad plainly as one of the few bazaars that sell it. Walk from the kimchi and spiced carrot to the meat stalls and the halal question stops being theoretical.
So here is the practical answer on halal food in Uzbekistan. Ordinary Uzbek cooking is halal by default, and you can eat plov, shashlik, samsa and lagman across the country without thinking twice. The exceptions are real but they're concentrated in a few predictable places: Korean and Russian kitchens, imported deli goods, a handful of bazaars and anything with alcohol in it.
Why the default is halal
The large majority of Uzbeks are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, and the national kitchen grew up around lamb, beef, chicken and horse. Pork isn't part of it. You won't find it in a plov centre, a chaikhana or a roadside shashlik grill.
That doesn't mean every butcher follows a certified slaughter procedure, and nobody publishes figures on it. What it means is that the cuisine itself contains no pork and the people cooking it overwhelmingly don't eat it either. If you need documented certification, the Halol mark below is newer and narrower than you'd think.
Where pork actually turns up
Uzbekistan's cities hold several food traditions besides the Uzbek one, and two of them use pork.
South Korean restaurants
Tashkent has a string of Korean restaurants, many around Oybek and Mirabad. The newer, South Korean-style places cook the way Seoul does, and that means pork: traveller listings for Restaurant Seoul in Tashkent mention sweet-and-sour pork (last checked: September 2026). The older Koryo-saram tradition, the cooking of Koreans deported to Central Asia in 1937, adapted to a region where pork was hard to get, so the salads you'll meet in bazaars are mostly vegetables, fish and beef. The steamed buns called pyanse are the item to ask about, since the filling is cabbage with meat, and the meat varies.
Russian cafés and delis
Pelmeni in the classic Russian recipe are pork and beef mixed. Salo (cured pork fat) appears in some Russian-run delis and cafés. The sausage counter is where travellers get caught, because kolbasa looks identical whether it's beef, chicken or pork, and imported Russian and Kazakh processed meats can contain pork-derived ingredients.
Certain bazaars
Besides Mirabad, the same expat guide lists Qo'yliq bazaar as having shops that sell pork, and older Russian-language forum threads name Farkhad bazaar's meat pavilion too. These are separate stalls, not mixed into the main mutton and beef rows. Chorsu, the bazaar most visitors actually go to, isn't on those lists, and its meat hall under the dome is the place to see lamb, beef and horse cut to order.
Reading labels in a supermarket
Packaging is usually in Uzbek (Latin script), Russian, or both. Three words do most of the work:
- свинина (svinina) and свиной (svinoy): Russian for pork and "pork" as an adjective, as in свиной желатин, pork gelatine
- cho'chqa go'shti: Uzbek for pork
- halol or халяль: the Uzbek and Russian spellings of halal
Imported sweets, gummy candy and yoghurt desserts are where gelatine hides. Local bread, dairy, dried fruit and nuts are the easy wins.
The Halol mark: what exists and what doesn't
Uzbekistan only set up a national halal certification scheme recently. Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 57 of 1 February 2025 approved the rules for certifying products and services against halal requirements, with priority given to standards from SMIIC, the standards institute of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation; the full text is on the government's national legislation database. The Technical Regulation Agency and the Committee on Religious Affairs were given the job of accrediting a certification body, and products could carry the mark from 1 May 2025, as Kun.uz reported at the time.
The first body with international accreditation followed on 15 October 2025: a halal certification office at UzTest, the state testing and quality-control centre, accredited by Türkiye's Halal Accreditation Authority under OIC/SMIIC 2:2019, according to UzDaily (last checked: September 2026).
Two things follow for a traveller. The scheme is voluntary and was built largely with exports in mind, so the logo shows up on packaged goods and at some businesses, not on the average teahouse. And the absence of a sticker at a family plov centre tells you nothing either way. Treat the mark as a bonus, not a filter, or you'll rule out most of the country's best food.
Alcohol on the same table
This surprises Muslim visitors more than the pork. Uzbekistan is a secular state, alcohol is legal, and most tourist restaurants in Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva serve beer, wine and vodka, sometimes at the next table over from a family eating plov. Our guide to what people drink here covers the wineries and prices.
If a dry dining room matters to you, the traditional chaikhana is your friend: many don't serve alcohol at all. Cooking with wine isn't part of Uzbek cuisine, so the concern is the bar, not the pot.
Horse meat: qazi, norin and the Hanafi view
Horse is a prized meat in Uzbekistan, and it's the one halal-adjacent question travellers from other traditions actually ask. The cured sausage qazi (also spelled kazy) sits on top of festive plov in Samarkand, and norin, Tashkent's cold noodle dish, is built on boiled horse meat.
Scholars differ on it. Hanafi jurists commonly explain that Abu Hanifa regarded horse meat as disliked (makruh tanzihi), mainly because of the horse's value in war, while his students Abu Yusuf and Muhammad al-Shaybani held it permissible; Darul Ifta Birmingham, a UK Hanafi institute, summarises the position this way. Shafi'i scholars generally permit it too. We don't rule on it; just know it's on the plate and decide for yourself.
Horse is hard to spot once it's sliced. Qazi is dark, with a ring of white fat; if in doubt, ask.
How to ask, in Uzbek and Russian
A short question works better than an explanation. These are polite and understood everywhere; our Uzbek phrasebook has pronunciation help for the rest of the trip.
- Cho'chqa go'shti bormi? (Is there pork in it?)
- Bu halolmi? (Is this halal?)
- Ot go'shtimi? (Is it horse meat?)
- Здесь есть свинина? (Zdes' yest' svinina? Is there pork here?) for Russian-speaking staff in Korean or Russian places
If you're avoiding broth and fat as well as pork, that's a different question, and our vegetarian eating guide goes through which dishes hide meat stock.
During Ramadan
Nothing closes by law. Restaurants in the cities keep daytime hours, and some smaller places in the Fergana Valley and in villages shut until sunset. Iftar is when restaurants fill and when you're most likely to be invited into a home, where the food is, predictably, halal. The timings, nisholda and the Ramazan Hayit holiday are covered in our piece on travelling during the fasting month.
One habit that saves the most trouble
Order the sausage last. Of everything on a Tashkent table, the plate of mixed cold cuts in a Russian-style café or the kolbasa in a supermarket chiller is the item most likely to hold pork without saying so, while the plov, the samsa and the skewers almost never will. Check that one item, ask about pyanse in Korean places, and you've covered nearly every real risk in the country.