If you like to eat delicious food and you’re stuck in Astana for a week… well, my condolences.

Even if you’re stuck in the super-luxury Ritz, which has Selfie and superb breakfasts.

Paradoxically, if you compare it, for example, to Almaty and its great meat / pilaf Klondike, but infernal interior/atmosphere, here in places of the same type you find absolutely nothing interesting except for the just mentioned infernal interior/atmosphere.

All they have is meat: it’s of high quality, served on five-meter skewers, but that’s it.

There’s never any “wow”, they have fucking nothing to strike and amaze you!

Except for one nuance: “Qazaq Gourmet”.

Actually, if someone in the city, where the norm is presented by “chicks/glitters/hookah/pathos” ™, gives to his author’s restaurant such a name, which is very self-ironical on my taste, it can’t be bad.

I’m not ready to mess around with all the names in the menu. But I can assure you that we went for all the dishes with the most incomprehensible letter combinations. And obviously we had meat.

The only thing I can remember is dry powder/chees “qurt”, which came with noodle soup instead of parmesan.

Everything was tasty indeed, something more, something less.

And this everything, unlike the rest local food, does make sense: it’s invented with a certain purpose and supplied with additives, gratin, sauces, which are made of some berries or wild plum, with something unknown that can hardly be pronounced but is delicious. Behind all this one can feel thought and labor and not just «arugula with shrimps» ™.

The night before was the infernal Friday night, so the head was exploding and the Kazakh version of okroshka with ayran, poured by two hands, as if by two-handed weapon, was really helpful.

Then there appeared people with musical instruments, and the moment they sat down on a small cozy scene similar to a yurt, we knew we were fucked.

But suddenly the national instruments revealed ultra-melodiousness and quietness that made us sit there and float, and float, and float to their sounds, even with our Friday’s head.

Being an adept of panna cotta, I most vividly remember the local panna cotta 2.0, made of milk and something like plum sorbet. All the details of the fatty mousse were strongly emphasized in it. It had a barely perceptible complicated semisweet aftertaste.

At the end the waitress, bringing us the casket with the account (for 5 people) and a pen in a special case, asked:

“Any comments regarding the kitchen?”

“This is the second restaurant in the city where one can actually have something to eat!” we answered honestly.