Bishkek punches well above its weight for food. The standard Central Asian dishes — laghman (hand-pulled noodles in spiced lamb broth), plov (rice with lamb and carrots), manty (steamed lamb dumplings), shashlik (skewered meat) — are everywhere and uniformly good. But the city's deep mix of Kyrgyz, Russian, Korean, Dungan (Hui Chinese), and Uzbek populations means the dining options run far beyond that base.
Korean food in Bishkek is genuinely excellent, a legacy of the Stalin-era deportations of Soviet Koreans to Central Asia. Dungan restaurants serve a hybrid Chinese-Muslim cuisine that exists almost nowhere else outside Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. There is also a recent wave of more ambitious modern restaurants — wood-fired pizza, Georgian khinkali, Italian — concentrated in the centre.