Last updated: July 2026 · Written by the Kazakhstan Tourism Guide editorial team
I came to Astana the first time for the architecture and stayed for the food, which was not the plan. Somewhere between a bowl of horse-meat beshbarmak in a yurt-style dining room and a glass of wine on a 25th-floor terrace with the whole steppe glowing beneath me, the capital won me over. This is a young city that eats seriously, and it does so across a wider range than most visitors expect.
Astana restaurants range from yurt-style Kazakh dining rooms serving beshbarmak to 25th-floor rooftops, Uzbek plov houses, Georgian grills and third-wave cafés. Expect to pay from about 3,000 tenge (roughly $6) for a casual meal up to 15,000–40,000 tenge a head for fine dining. Most cluster on the Left Bank.
Over several trips I’ve eaten my way from the Green Bazaar to the top of the towers, and below is the honest version of where to go, what to order and what it costs. One caveat up front, and I mean it: restaurants in Astana open, close, rebrand and relocate faster than any guide can keep up with. For every venue I name here, check current hours and location on the 2GIS app before you set out. It’s the single most useful thing I can tell you.
Where to eat in Astana at a glance
If you only skim one thing, make it this. Here’s the lay of the land by category, with a well-known example or two and a rough price band per person. Treat the venues as starting points rather than guarantees, and confirm they’re still trading before you go.
| Category | Example venues | Rough price per head | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Kazakh | Saksaul, Arnau, Daididau | 4,000–12,000 tenge | Beshbarmak, kazy, a first taste of the steppe |
| Central Asian & plov | Alasha, Rumi, Uzbek plov houses | 3,000–7,000 tenge | Plov, lagman, manti, folk-show dinners |
| Fine dining & rooftops | Qazaq Gourmet, Eternal Sky (Vechnoe Nebo) | 15,000–40,000+ tenge | Views, special occasions, tasting menus |
| International | Daredzhani (Georgian), ÖZEN (Japanese), La Rivière (Mediterranean) | 6,000–20,000 tenge | A break from meat and noodles |
| Steak & grills | Line Brew, Salter’s | 8,000–25,000 tenge | Big appetites, groups, beer with dinner |
| Cafés & brunch | Rafe Coffee & Food, Bon Bon, Eagilik Books & Coffee | 2,500–6,000 tenge | Coffee, breakfast, working, slow mornings |
| Budget & food courts | Khan Shatyr, Keruen, Mega Silk Way, Green Bazaar | 1,500–4,000 tenge | Fast, cheap, familiar; feeding kids |
Astana’s food scene, and how it got interesting
Astana is a young capital in a hurry, and its restaurants reflect that. Three influences sit on the plate at once. There’s the nomadic Kazakh tradition, built around horse and lamb, dairy and dough, the food of people who moved with their herds. There’s the Soviet layer, which left behind stroganoff, borscht, cutlets and a national fondness for dill. And there’s the newer international wave that arrived with the money and the ambition once the capital moved here in 1997.
What that means for you is choice. You can eat a genuinely traditional Kazakh meal at lunch and Japanese or Georgian at dinner without crossing the city. If you’re planning your days more broadly, dining slots neatly alongside the other things to do in Astana — most of the good restaurants sit within a short taxi ride of the main sights, so you rarely have to choose between seeing the towers and eating well.
A quick note on names, because it trips people up. The capital was called Nur-Sultan from 2019 to September 2022, then reverted to Astana. Older reviews and menus may still use the previous name, and some venues have moved at least once during the city’s constant building boom. Again: verify on 2GIS. I’ll stop repeating it eventually, but not yet.
Where the restaurants cluster
Astana is split by the Ishim (Esil) River into a Left Bank and a Right Bank, and knowing which is which saves you a lot of taxi confusion.
The Left Bank: Turan Avenue and the rooftops
The Left Bank is the new, monumental city — the government district, the shiny towers, the wide boulevards. Turan Avenue and the streets around it have quietly become the capital’s restaurant district, and the tall buildings here hold most of the rooftop and top-floor dining rooms. If you’re already out photographing Baiterek Tower or wandering the government quarter, you’re within striking distance of a lot of good tables. This is where I’d base an evening if views matter to you.
The Right Bank: the old centre and the Ishim embankment
Cross the river and the mood softens. The Right Bank is the older, more lived-in part of town, with leafier streets and a more local feel. The Ishim embankment is the pick here in warm weather — a run of restaurants with terraces looking over the water. Farhi, which opened in 1999 and is often described as the first Kazakh restaurant in the modern capital, sits in this older riverside centre, and Astana Nury does Kazakh and Caucasian food along the embankment. Both are the kind of place locals bring visiting relatives, though as ever, confirm they’re open and where before you commit a whole evening.
Malls and food courts
Don’t turn your nose up at the malls — in a city where winter bites hard, they’re where a lot of ordinary eating happens. Khan Shatyr, the giant tent-shaped mall, has a food court and sit-down restaurants under one translucent roof. Keruen sits close to Baiterek and is handy between sights. Mega Silk Way, out by the old Expo site, is the biggest, and it holds Rumi, a well-regarded Uzbek and Central Asian spot, alongside the usual court of chains. Malls are your rainy-day, cold-day, travelling-with-kids answer.
The Green Bazaar and cheap eats
For the cheapest, most honest food in the city, head to a bazaar. The market stalls sell samsa straight from the tandoor, plov by the scoop, fresh bread, horse-meat sausage, mountains of dried fruit and nuts, and the pickles and salads that go with everything. You can graze here for the price of a coffee back home. It’s also the best place to get your head around Kazakh food before you sit down to a proper restaurant version of it.
Traditional Kazakh food and where to try it
This is the food you came for, whether you know it yet or not. Kazakh cuisine is meat-forward and unapologetic about it, built for hard winters and long distances. Let me walk you through what to order.
Beshbarmak is the national dish and your first mission. The name means “five fingers”, because traditionally you eat it with your hands. It’s boiled meat — horse or lamb — laid over wide flat noodles, topped with a sweet onion sauce, and served with a bowl of sorpa, the rich broth it all cooked in. It’s comforting, faintly gamey if you go for the horse, and completely central to how Kazakhs eat together. Order it once and you’ll understand the whole cuisine better.
Beyond that, look for kuyrdak (a fry-up of liver, heart, kidney and other offal with potato and onion — better than it sounds, I promise), kazy and shuzhuk (horse-meat sausages, sliced thin, often served cold as a starter), manti (big steamed dumplings of meat and onion), and baursak (puffs of fried dough that arrive with tea and disappear alarmingly fast). On the drinks side, the adventurous should try kumys, fermented mare’s milk, sour and fizzy and an acquired taste, or shubat, its camel’s-milk cousin. And keep an eye out for kurt, hard little balls of dried salted cheese sold as a snack — intense, and worth one bite even if it’s not for you.
For a sit-down version, Saksaul does Kazakh and Central Asian cooking in a yurt-styled room at mid-range prices and is a gentle, comfortable introduction. Arnau leans into the full experience with national décor and live folk music, which is either charming or a lot depending on your mood. Daididau and Qazaq Gourmet take Kazakh food upmarket, refining the classics for a fine-dining setting — more on Qazaq Gourmet under rooftops, because the view is half the point. All of these are well established, but menus and locations shift, so check current details before you build a night around any of them.
Central Asian classics: plov, lagman and the art of the dumpling
Kazakhstan sits at a crossroads, and its neighbours’ cooking is everywhere in Astana — often at the best value-for-money you’ll find. This is the food I eat most when I’m here on my own tenge.
Plov (also spelled palov or osh) is the region’s great one-pot dish: rice slow-cooked in a wide kazan with lamb, carrots, onion, cumin and whole heads of garlic, sometimes with chickpeas or raisins. Good plov is glossy, savoury and just rich enough. Uzbek cooks are the acknowledged masters, and a plate of it with a tomato-and-onion salad is one of the great cheap lunches anywhere.
Lagman is the other staple to know — hand-pulled noodles served either in a spiced meat-and-vegetable soup or fried with the same, a dish the Uyghur and Dungan communities do especially well. Add manti (those steamed dumplings again), samsa (flaky meat pastries from the tandoor) and shashlik (grilled skewers) and you have the backbone of Central Asian eating.
For a proper night of it, Alasha is the theatrical choice — palace-style décor, Uzbek food and folk shows, the sort of place that turns dinner into an event. Worth knowing there’s also an Alasha in Almaty, so don’t get your reviews crossed. Rumi, over at Mega Silk Way, is the more polished, mall-based option for Uzbek and wider Central Asian dishes. Both are popular enough that a weekend booking is smart, and both, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, should be double-checked on 2GIS first.
Fine dining and rooftop views
Astana was built to be looked at, and the smartest restaurants have worked out that the view is the menu’s best dish. If you’re going to splurge once, do it up high.
Eternal Sky — you’ll also see it as Vechnoe Nebo — sits on the 25th floor and serves pan-Central Asian food with a panorama that does a lot of the heavy lifting. Qazaq Gourmet takes refined modern Kazakh cooking to an upper floor with wide city views, and it’s my pick if you want the food to be as good as the outlook rather than an afterthought. Both are firmly in the upscale band, and both come into their own after dark, when the whole Left Bank lights up and the towers you spent the afternoon photographing turn into a skyline.
A word of honest advice: some rooftop and revolving-restaurant spots in cities like this are more about the setting than the plate. That’s fine — just go in knowing whether you’re paying for dinner or for the view, and set your expectations accordingly. If it’s a landmark evening you’re after, pairing a rooftop table with a walk through Astana’s architecture lit up at night is hard to beat. For special occasions and anything on a weekend, book ahead — the good tables by the window go first.
Hotel restaurants round out the top end. The international chains along the Left Bank run polished dining rooms and Sunday brunches, and while you’ll pay hotel prices, the quality is reliable when you want a sure thing.
International restaurants
After a few days of meat and noodles, most travellers start craving something else, and Astana delivers. The Georgian scene is a highlight — Daredzhani does the greatest hits of Georgian cooking, and if you’ve never had khachapuri (a boat of bread filled with molten cheese and a runny egg) or khinkali (soup dumplings you eat by hand), this is your moment. It’s one of the food cultures that travels best into Kazakhstan, and I rarely leave without a meal of it.
For Japanese and sushi, ÖZEN has a solid reputation. La Rivière does Mediterranean cooking and is a genuine locals’ favourite rather than a tourist trap, which is exactly why I mention it. Mökki is the trendy contemporary option when you want something more design-forward and current. And for the steak crowd, Salter’s covers the American-style grill, while Line Brew pairs steaks with its own microbrewery — though that one has moved location more than once over the years, so it’s the first place I’d tell you to verify before turning up.
If you find yourself comparing cities, the capital’s international scene is broad but Almaty’s is deeper and more established — worth knowing if your trip covers both. I’ve written separately about the best restaurants in Almaty if you’re heading south as well.
Cafés, coffee and brunch
Astana has a real coffee culture now, which wasn’t a given a decade ago. The third-wave scene is small but sincere, and the cafés double as warm refuges when the weather turns, which it does for a good chunk of the year.
Rafe Coffee & Food is a dependable local chain with several branches — good coffee, all-day food, easy to slot into a sightseeing day. Marrone Rosso and Bon Bon lean toward the European café-patisserie end, all cakes and pastries and long lingering. Eagilik Books & Coffee is my kind of place: a bookshop-café where you can nurse a flat white and actually get some work done. For brunch, the hotel restaurants and the smarter cafés put on a proper weekend spread. As always, branches come and go, so a quick check saves a wasted walk.
One small pleasure worth planning for: in a cold-climate capital, a good café between sights isn’t a luxury, it’s strategy. I build one into every afternoon here.
Budget eats and food courts
You do not need money to eat well in Astana, and some of my happiest meals here have cost the price of a coffee back home. Street food is the way in — a fresh samsa straight from the tandoor or a plate of plov from a market stall runs to a couple of dollars, and it’s often better than the sit-down version.
The bazaars are the obvious budget move — the Green Bazaar and the city’s other markets sell everything from tandoor bread to those pyramids of dried apricots, walnuts and raisins that make the perfect between-meals snack. Bring some cash; not every stall takes cards.
The mall food courts are the other budget mainstay. Khan Shatyr, Keruen and Mega Silk Way all have big courts mixing local dishes with the international chains, and a filling meal there lands comfortably under 4,000 tenge. They’re not romantic, but they’re fast, warm and easy when you’re travelling with kids or just don’t want to think about it. For a casual sit-down meal outside the food courts, budget from around 3,000 tenge and you’ll eat perfectly well.
What a meal costs in Astana
Let me put real numbers on it. Prices move, and the tenge does its own thing against the dollar, but as a guide for 2026 — with the exchange rate hovering around 470 tenge to the US dollar — here’s what I’d budget.
- Street food: a samsa or a scoop of plov from a market stall is a couple of dollars — well under 1,500 tenge.
- Budget / casual meal: from around 3,000 tenge (roughly $6–7) for a solid plate in a canteen, food court or simple café.
- Mid-range main course: 3,000–6,000 tenge, so a comfortable dinner for two, with a couple of dishes and drinks, lands around 15,000 tenge (about $32).
- Fine dining, rooftops and hotels: roughly 15,000–40,000 tenge and up per head once you add drinks. A big night out for two with wine can climb well past that.
By the standards of a European or North American capital, that’s excellent value across the board — you’re eating very well in the mid-range for what a mediocre chain meal costs at home. For the bigger picture on daily budgets, transport and hotels, see my breakdown of how much a trip to Kazakhstan costs. Food is rarely the line item that hurts.
Practical tips for eating out in Astana
A handful of things I wish someone had told me before my first meal here.
Tipping. Nicer restaurants often add a service charge of around 10% to the bill — check for it before you add anything on top, because it’s easy to double-tip. Where there’s no service charge, rounding up or leaving about 10% for good service is appreciated but not obligatory. Nobody will chase you down the street.
Cards versus cash. Cards are widely accepted across restaurants, cafés and even a lot of smaller spots — contactless payment is genuinely everywhere in Kazakhstan. That said, carry some cash for the bazaars, street stalls and the occasional stubborn card reader. A little tenge in your pocket removes all friction.
Reservations. For rooftops, fine dining and anywhere on a Friday or Saturday night, book ahead. The window tables and the terrace seats go first, and turning up hopeful on a weekend is how you end up in a food court by default.
Use 2GIS. I’ve said it repeatedly and I’ll say it once more, plainly: download 2GIS. Across Kazakhstan it’s more accurate than Google Maps for opening hours, current locations, phone numbers and reviews, and given how often venues here move or rebrand, it’s the difference between a good evening and a locked door.
Vegetarians, read this. Kazakh cuisine is built on meat, and the traps are the hidden ones — many soups and sauces are made with lamb fat or meat broth even when the dish looks plant-based. If you don’t eat meat, say clearly that you want it with “no meat, including no broth”, and lean on the Central Asian vegetable dishes, the Georgian menu (which has wonderful vegetarian options), and the international and café spots, where you’ll have a far easier time.
Summer terraces. If you’re here in July or August, the city opens up outdoors — the Ishim embankment and the rooftops put out their terraces, and eating outside in the long steppe evenings is one of Astana’s real pleasures. Pack a layer, though; even summer nights can turn cool.
Pull all of this together and it slots neatly into a wider plan — my suggested Astana itinerary pairs the main sights with places to eat nearby, so you’re never hungry and lost at the same time.
Frequently asked questions
What food is Astana known for?
Astana is known for traditional Kazakh dishes built around horse and lamb — above all beshbarmak, the national dish of boiled meat over flat noodles — plus offal fries like kuyrdak, horse-meat sausages (kazy and shuzhuk), and Central Asian staples such as plov, lagman and manti that arrived from neighbouring cuisines. Alongside that runs a Soviet-era layer and a growing international scene, so the capital is really known for range rather than a single signature.
What is the national dish of Kazakhstan?
The national dish is beshbarmak. The name means “five fingers”, because it was traditionally eaten by hand. It’s boiled horse or lamb served over wide flat noodles with a sweet onion sauce, accompanied by a bowl of the rich broth, called sorpa, that the meat was cooked in. If you try one Kazakh dish in Astana, make it this one.
How much does a meal cost in Astana?
A casual meal starts from around 3,000 tenge (roughly $6–7), with mid-range mains running 3,000–6,000 tenge — so a relaxed dinner for two comes to about 15,000 tenge (around $32). Fine dining, rooftops and hotel restaurants run roughly 15,000–40,000 tenge and up per person with drinks. Street food like samsa or plov is just a couple of dollars. Prices shift, so treat these as 2026 ballpark figures at about 470 tenge to the dollar.
Where can I eat traditional Kazakh food in Astana?
For traditional Kazakh cooking, well-known options include Saksaul for a comfortable yurt-style introduction, Arnau for national décor and live folk music, and Daididau or Qazaq Gourmet for a more upscale, refined take. Farhi in the older riverside centre is one of the capital’s long-running Kazakh restaurants. All of these are established, but menus and locations change, so confirm current details on 2GIS before you go.
Are there vegetarian options in Astana?
Yes, though you have to be deliberate about it, because Kazakh cuisine is meat-heavy and many soups and sauces use lamb fat or meat broth. Make things easy by telling staff you want no meat, including no broth, and by leaning on Central Asian vegetable dishes, Georgian restaurants (which have excellent vegetarian food), and the international spots and cafés, where meat-free choices are far more common.
Do you tip in restaurants in Astana?
Tipping is appreciated but not required. Many mid-range and upscale restaurants already add a service charge of around 10%, so check the bill before adding more to avoid tipping twice. Where no service charge is included, rounding up or leaving roughly 10% for good service is a friendly gesture rather than an obligation.
What is the best area to eat in Astana?
The Left Bank, around Turan Avenue, has become the capital’s main restaurant district and holds most of the rooftop and top-floor dining, making it the best base for a big night out or a view. The Right Bank and the Ishim embankment are lovelier in summer for riverside terraces, while the malls and bazaars cover budget and fast eating year-round. For most visitors, the Left Bank is the easy answer.
Final thoughts
Astana surprised me, and I suspect it will surprise you too. This is a capital that will happily sell you a rooftop tasting menu and a horse-meat sausage on the same day, and mean both of them. Start with beshbarmak, graze the bazaars, splurge once on a view, and lean on Central Asian and Georgian food when you want a change — that’s a week of very good, very varied eating for far less than you’d spend in most world capitals.
Just hold everything here loosely. The venues I’ve named are the well-established ones, chosen precisely because they’ve stuck around, but this is a fast-moving city and any of them could shift address or hours between my writing and your visit. Open 2GIS, check before you go, and then go hungry. You’ll eat well.
Round out your plans with getting around Kazakhstan and the best time to visit Kazakhstan.
Photo credits
Beshbarmak: upyernoz (CC BY 2.0). Plov: Sinchalak Musulmon (CC BY-SA 4.0). Bazaar dried fruit and nuts: neiljs (CC BY 2.0). Astana at night: Matti Blume (CC BY-SA 4.0). All via Wikimedia Commons.
