Kabob (shashlik)

Lamb, liver and minced-meat skewers grilled over charcoal and served with raw onion, vinegar and hot bread — the smoke that drifts down every Samarkand street.

Everything on a skewer

What Russian speakers call shashlik, Uzbeks usually call kabob. There are many kinds: chunks of lamb or beef, meat threaded with nuggets of tail fat, liver wrapped in caul fat, qiyma (lula) kabob of chopped meat mixed with onion and spices, plus chicken and fish. The meat rests for a few hours with onion, salt, cumin and pepper before it is threaded onto flat iron skewers and grilled over embers in a long brazier.

Kabob comes with thinly sliced onion, a splash of vinegar and hot bread, with achichuk salad on the side. In teahouses it is ordered by the skewer, so everyone picks a couple of their favourite kinds.

Festivals and records

Kabob is part of every market day and family picnic, and Samarkand’s festivals have turned it into a record-breaker: a 30-metre shashlik was grilled at the Samarkand Plov festival in August 2025, and a 20-metre kebab at the paragliding festival in Urgut earlier that year.

At the kabob house

In a kabob house the raw skewers are usually on display: you point at what you want and it goes straight onto the coals. The custom is to slide the meat off the long skewer onto a piece of bread and scatter it with onion. Green tea follows — popular belief holds that it helps the rich meat go down.