← All articles · Kazakhstan ·

Almaty, August 2025

Our third Almaty was the eating trip: grilled fish under a snowdrift of salad, a tandyr loaf the size of the table, and tea from a wood-fired garden samovar.

Our third Almaty, August 2025, and by now we knew what the city does best. This was the eating trip, and it announced its intentions before we had even landed.

A bottle of Bacchus Kazakhstan cognac with a five star label standing on an airline seat tray, a Kazakh-language seat belt notice behind it
Photographed at the seat on the way in: Kazakh cognac, five stars, according to its own label anyway.

What we ate

A whole grilled fish arrived under a snowdrift of chopped salad, and then the bread came out: a tandyr loaf roughly the size of the table.

A whole grilled fish on a white platter with chopped tomato and cucumber salad and a spiced lemon wedge
Grilled whole fish, charred properly, salad doing the supporting act.
Dileep holding a knife and fork behind a huge puffed tandyr flatbread, with the finished fish platter in front of him
Man versus bread. The bread put up a respectable fight.

The humbler end of the menu did just as well. Dumplings in clear broth, exactly what a mountain day asks for.

A white bowl of dumplings in clear broth with a cube of carrot, on a pale wooden table
Dumplings in broth, August 2025. No garnish theatrics, none needed.

The best cup of tea, though, was out of town: an evening in a garden east of the city where a wood-fired samovar smoked away with the porcelain teapot balanced on top, exactly as it has been done forever.

A wood-fired metal samovar smoking on a stool in a garden at night, a white porcelain teapot warming on its chimney
Tea the slow way: samovar below, teapot on the chimney, smoke everywhere.

Gardens in August

Almaty gardens in August earn their keep: grapes ripening on the vine and brambles running the full production line from pink to done.

A cluster of dusty blue-purple grapes hanging among green vine leaves
Grapes getting on with it in an Almaty garden, August 2025.
Ripe blackberries and unripe red berries on a bramble cane, a hand reaching in from the left
Blackberries at every stage. Quality control was thorough.

Three visits now. The first was back in 2016, when the wooden cathedral and the Green Bazaar did the work, and we returned for the lake in August 2024.

Kazakhstan kept surprising us. The capital is a different planet entirely: see Astana. And the deep south runs the other way in time: Shymkent, Otrar and Turkistan.