Zohran Mamdani’s Favorite Restaurant: Urgut Osh Markazi

Bleu jumps on the Q train to suss it out.

By Aubrey Wang

Labelled NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s favorite restaurant, Urgut Osh Markazi sits in an unassuming shopfront on Coney Island Avenue, a two-way strip stitching Prospect Park to Brighton Beach.

For a politician who built his campaign on immigrant New York, it’s very on-brand: halal Uzbek comfort food, priced for cab drivers and home health aides, served in a room that doubles as a community hall where languages, late-night shifts, and big steel pots set the agenda.

There’s something definitively Soviet about it all. A shopfront framed by lace curtains, a TV on bare plastered walls blaring a Saudi Arabian call to prayer, and Cold War-era cake counters. It fits seamlessly into Flatbush, long touted as a mecca of diasporic cuisine.

Along Ocean Avenue, you’ll find Instagram-famous jerk chicken shops, award-winning Indian sweets, and Haitian bars. And now, from Bleu, the last frontier of minority food: Uzbek cooking.

Often described as a blend of Middle Eastern and Asian traditions, Uzbek cuisine mixes Mediterranean staples like tomato, yogurt, and chickpeas with dumplings, fried pancakes, and the rice-heavy heart of Central Asia. Chilli, cumin, and smoke run deep in its veins.

As Leo Tolstoy said, all happy families are the same, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. By the same token, all Uzbek restaurants are brilliant and delicious, yet each reveals a different local history of resilience and survival. On Brooklyn’s Central Asian strip, those differences are subtle but telling.

At Urgut Osh Markazi, plov arrives in heaping, family-style portions. This is a no-frills canteen where big pots and long tables do the talking. A few blocks away, other Uzbek joints lean into dough and fire: tandoor-baked samsa, fluffy manti, cosy café energy, and regulars on a first-name basis. Together, they form a living archive of a cuisine never quite the same twice, even when the ingredients look identical on home-laminated menus.

Manti

The manti arrive as five oversized dumplings huddled between twin dollops of yogurt, drizzled with julienned carrots. Hearty, unfussy, and unmistakably authentic. The yogurt’s acidity cuts through the mincemeat, a mix of carrots and potatoes folded into a savory, comforting filling. The ingredients are simple, but the craftsmanship is obvious in the delicate, wafer-thin wrappers that hold everything together.

Plov Combo

If you ate only plov at every Uzbek restaurant for the rest of your life, you’d still get a remarkably complete portrait of the culture. Every family makes it differently. Our plov was heavily perfumed and fluffy, steeped in the flavors of the Silk Road. The beef fell apart in the mouth, the vegetables were richly caramelized, and the peppers brought a sharp, exciting edge to homely ingredients.

For weddings and other large gatherings, plov is cooked in vast kazans, stirred constantly to prevent burning — a task treated with status and pride, not unlike a seasoned BBQ master guarding his pit.

Kurutob

Having simmered the wind out of our bones, we decided to try a cold dish. Kurutob, a popular spring staple across Central Asia, is often described as a bread salad, though that sells it short. It’s really a vibrant festival of fresh garden ingredients (cucumbers, tomatoes, dill) heaped over a savory sauce made from qurut (or kurt), a fermented dairy whose lineage runs deep.

In fact, English borrowed the word “yogurt” from Turkish. Uzbek food is grounded in communal values: shared plates, shared labour, and shared time. The kurutob is definitely a dish meant to be eaten with others.

Honey Cakes

For dessert, we had honey cakes: caramelly, decadent, and stacked in mille-feuille layers. Thin honey-soaked sheets folded into each other, each one catching a little more cream than the last, creating a velvety, buttery richness that felt instantly nostalgic. It tasted like comfort food prepared by an auntie, the kind who insists on feeding you even after you’re full.

There’s an Uzbek value called mehmondo'stilik. Basically, it means this: it’s rude not to overfeed a guest — an ethos of hospitality that might make anyone with ethnic grandparents nostalgic.