Korean Food in Uzbekistan: The Koryo-saram Kitchen
Korean carrot salad, cold kuksi noodles and vinegar-cured he: how the 1937 deportation created Uzbekistan's Korean food, and where to eat it in Tashkent.
The counter runs the length of a trestle table, and almost everything on it sits in a white or clear plastic tub with a spoon stuck upright in the middle. Orange first, because the carrot is always the biggest pile: long, damp shreds glossy with oil and flecked with red pepper. Then the darker tubs. Aubergine gone soft and purple-black, pale cabbage streaked with chilli, glass noodles, bean sprouts, seaweed the colour of a wet olive, grey-green strands of fern. Prices are scrawled on scraps of card; the scales wait at the end.
This is Korean food in Uzbekistan, and none of it came from Seoul. It's the cooking of the Koryo-saram, the ethnic Koreans of the former Soviet Union, and it was shaped by a forced journey in 1937 and by whatever grew in the soil at the far end of it.
How Koreans ended up in Tashkent
Koreans had farmed the Russian Far East, around Vladivostok and the Posyet district, since the late 19th century. In autumn 1937 Stalin's government deported all of them. The NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov reported on 29 October 1937 that 124 trains carrying 36,442 families, 171,781 people in total, had been sent to Central Asia, according to The Times of Central Asia. Novastan, the Central Asia news site, gives the rounded figure of around 172,000, moved mainly to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Roughly 74,000 of them were sent to Uzbekistan, per the same Times of Central Asia piece. People lived in dugouts, barracks and warehouses that first winter, and many families lost infants in the first months. On the collective farms around Tashkent they went back to growing rice, and the community grew: Uzbekistan's last Soviet census, in 1989, counted about 183,000 Koreans.
That's why the food is here. It's also why it doesn't taste quite like anything in Korea.
Substitution is the whole story
A Korean kitchen in 1937 relied on napa cabbage, daikon radish, sea fish and fermented seafood pastes. The Uzbek steppe offered carrots, onions, river fish, beef, cheap vinegar and coriander seed. So cooks swapped. Reporting from Koryo-saram kitchens in Kazakhstan by The World (PRX) sums the pattern up neatly: sea fish were replaced by freshwater fish, and the carrot salad was invented because the radish wasn't there. The same report notes that the red chilli powder these households use is often grown and processed in Uzbekistan itself.
Think of it the way you'd think of an Italian-American red-sauce menu: born of homesickness, built from what the new country sold, and by now a cuisine in its own right with its own grandmothers arguing about it.
The dishes worth knowing
Morkovcha, the "Korean carrot" nobody in Korea eats
Julienned raw carrot, garlic, ground coriander, vinegar and oil, with hot oil poured over red pepper to finish it. Russians call it morkov po-koreyski, "Korean-style carrots", and sell it in supermarkets from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok. It's a Soviet Korean invention, a stand-in for radish-based side dishes, and you won't find it on a menu in Seoul. The coriander is the giveaway: that's a Central Asian flavour, not a Korean one.
Our opinion, which some readers will dispute: the version from a bazaar tub, made that morning and still sharp with vinegar, is so far ahead of the supermarket kind that they barely count as the same dish.
Kuksi, the cold noodle bowl
The name is usually written kuksi in English and Russian (кукси), sometimes kuksu; it's the local form of the Korean word guksu, which just means noodles. A bowl holds thin wheat noodles, strips of fried beef, a thin omelette cut into ribbons, and a heap of vegetable salads such as cucumber, cabbage and carrot. Over the top goes the chilled broth, which Tashkent's Hook.report, in an August 2026 roundup by Vlada Kim, describes as water seasoned with soy sauce, vinegar and spices (last checked: September 2026). It's sour, salty and cold.
Is it spicy? It can be, but you control it. The heat usually comes from the salads and the chilli oil on the table rather than the broth, so a plain bowl is mild. On a 40°C July afternoon in Tashkent, we'd argue there's no better lunch in the city.
He (heh), raw fish cured in vinegar
Spelled he, heh or hye (Russian хе), it descends from Korean raw-fish hoe. Soviet Koreans made it with what they had, river fish, beef, chicken or liver, mixed with grated carrot and fried onion, and used a lot of vinegar and a long marinade to make it safe. That's the explanation given by the Russian cooking site Food.ru. The acid firms the fish much like ceviche. If you've a sensitive stomach, or it's high summer and the tub has been sitting in the sun, this is the one item on the counter to skip.
Kimchi, and the rest of the counter
Koryo-saram kimchi (older speakers say chimchi) is usually made without the fermented shrimp paste used in Korea, so it tastes cleaner and more garlicky. Next to it you'll find the marinated aubergine, glass-noodle salad, bean sprouts, seaweed and fern. You may also meet warm pyanse, big steamed buns filled with cabbage and meat, at Korean stalls and cafés. The meat in pyanse varies, so if pork matters to you, ask; our notes on eating halal in Uzbekistan cover the phrases.
Where to find Korean food in Tashkent
Start with a bazaar, not a restaurant.
Mirabad bazaar is the strongest choice. It sits on Nukus Street near Oybek and Tashkent metro stations, in an area with a large Korean population, and the city's official tourism site, VisitTashkent, notes that it sells Korean ingredients and ready-made salads, with Korean shops in and around the market (last checked: September 2026). It's also one of the few Tashkent bazaars known to sell pork, which tells you whose neighbourhood it is.
Chorsu has a Korean salad section too, and it's the one you're most likely to pass anyway. Combine it with a morning at the big domed market using our walk-through of Chorsu.
Prices are by weight, and sellers generally let you taste before buying. We couldn't find a reliable published per-kilo price as of September 2026, and it swings with the season, so point, taste, and ask for a small portion; a mixed plate of three or four salads with bread makes a cheap lunch. For vegetarians this counter is gold, as our guide to eating meat-free here explains, though he and some kimchi aren't vegetarian.
Restaurants are a split market. Hook.report's August 2026 roundup (in Russian) points to K-town, Makkoli, Mannam and Chenson for kuksi, and to 9292, Makkoli and Kim Sat Gat for South Korean cold-noodle dishes; many newer places cook modern South Korean food (kimbap, sundubu stew, bingsu) rather than the Koryo-saram kitchen, so check it's still open and look for кукси on the menu board, and ask at the Mirabad salad stalls where locals go for a bowl. Our Tashkent restaurant guide places the Korean cluster on the city map alongside the Uyghur and Georgian options.
One thing to know before you order
Carry a small lidded tub, or ask for a second bag. These salads sit in oil and vinegar, and a thin bazaar bag of morkovcha can leak onto everything else you bought before you reach the metro. And if you're comparing it with the tomato-and-onion plates served with plov, our rundown of Uzbek salads shows how differently the two traditions dress a vegetable.