Where to Get Authentic Pizza in Tashkent (No Tourist Traps)
Words by
Bobur Tashmatov
Finding authentic pizza in Tashkent is not as straightforward as you would expect in a city famous for plov and lagman. After nearly a decade of eating my way through the Uzbek capital, I have learned that the pizza scene here lives in the layer between Italian expat experimentation, Soviet-era nostalgia, and the restless creativity of young Uzbek cooks who trained abroad. This is not about delivery chains or mall food courts. This is about places where dough is pulled by hand, ovens have real stories behind them, and where the chef will look you in the eye if you ask for pineapple on your Margherita.
Tashkent has changed massively since the metro started accepting cashless payments and the nightlife on Shota Rustaveli street bloomed into something genuinely international. But the pizza culture here follows its own rhythm. Some places are family operations that opened small and stayed small on purpose. Others are the product of a specific wave of restauranteurs who came back from Moscow or Istanbul around 2015 to 2018 and wanted to fill a gap they felt personally. A surprising number are run by Italians who fell in love with an Uzbek woman, an Uzbek man, or simply the city itself. What follows is the guide I give to friends who arrive here and refuse to eat another serving of shashlik when all they want is a proper slice.
Carlo Giuliano Pizza Caffe (Shota Rustaveli Street)
If you are looking for the benchmark of traditional pizza Tashkent, Carlo Giuliano is where the conversation starts. Run by an actual Italian named, unsurprisingly, Carlo Giuliano, this restaurant sitting on one of Tashkent's most cosmopolitan streets has been serving Neapolitan-style pies since the mid-2010s. The space itself is compact, maybe forty seats at most, but the open kitchen lets you watch dough being stretched and slid into a brick oven that Carlo imported in pieces from Naples during his first year of operation. What separates this place from pretenders is the flour, which he blends himself from Italian tipo 00 and a local Uzbek wheat variety he says gives the crust a nuttier chew that you cannot replicate otherwise. The Margherita DOC reaches the table bubbling, with a darkened leopard-spotted edge and San Marzano tomatoes that taste like they came off a vine this morning. The burrata on the Burrata e Pesto pizza is flown in weekly and is worth the trip alone. Parking nearby on Shota Rustaveli is almost impossible during the dinner rush between 19:00 and 21:00, and the valet system they tried in 2022 was abandoned after three weeks. Come for a late lunch around 13:30 or an early dinner at 18:00 if you want a stress-free experience.
What to Order / See / Do: Order the Burrata e Pesto pizza and a glass of the Uzbek Saperavi red. Ask to see the oven up close before seating, it is a beautiful piece of craftsmanship.
Best Time: Tuesday through Thursday, 13:00-14:30, when the kitchen runs at peak focus and the post-lunch, pre-dinner calm means Carlo himself often comes out to chat.
The Vibe: Intimate, informal, occasionally loud when a table of Italian expats drops in. The dining room gets stuffy in August because the cooling system struggles when it exceeds 40 degrees outside. Not a place for large groups or business dinners.
Local Tip: Carlo quietly does "pizza nights" on certain Fridays where he experiments with Uzbek ingredients, think norin-spiced lamb as a topping or a fermented milk drizzle. No social media announcement, just ask when you arrive if anything special is planned.
Tashkent Connection: Carlo Giuliano's presence on Shota Rustaveli represents the wave of European migration into Tashkent's restaurant scene that accelerated after Uzbekistan began loosening visa requirements around 2017. This single restaurant arguably opened the door for several Italian concepts that followed.
La Piazza (Babur Street, Chilonzor District)
La Piazza sits on Babur Street in Chilonzor, far from the tourist center, and that is entirely the point. This is a neighborhood pizza joint that happens to be exceptional. The owner, a Tashkent native who spent four years in Rome working at a trattoria in Trastevere, came back in 2018 and opened La Piazza with a wood-fired oven that he commissioned from a local metalwork shop modeled on images from an Italian baking manual. The result is not precisely Neapolitan, nor Roman, but something in between that the owner calls "Tashkent Roman-style." The base is thin and shatteringly crispy at the edges, with a center that holds up under heavy toppings. The Diavola, made with a house-fermented chili paste that takes five days to prepare, has a kick that sneaks up on you two bites in. The Prosciutto e Rucola comes with parmesan shavings so plentiful they practically form a blanket over the arugula. Portions are generous enough that ordering one pizza between two is usually sufficient. They offer old movie nights every other Saturday at 20:00, projecting Italian cinema on a white wall while you eat, and it attracts a regular crowd of Italians, locals who miss Italy, and curious students from the nearby university branches that populate Chilonzor. The noise level on movie nights means you will not be having a quiet date, so come with friends.
What to Order / See / Do: Try the Diavola for the chili paste and the Calzone Classico, which arrives as a golden, football-shaped parcel with molten ricotta visible through the steam vent.
Best Time: Weekday evenings, 18:30-20:00. Movie nights every other Saturday but book ahead via Instagram DM.
The Vibe: Warm, close, red-checkered tables, Italian pop music from a speaker that needs replacing. Restroom is small and requires navigating through the kitchen, which is not for everyone.
Local Tip: The owner gives a 10% discount to anyone who walks from within 2 kilometers. It is a playful way of keeping the business hyper-local, and he will ask how you arrived.
Tashkent Connection: La Piazza is a perfect example of how the "returnee generation" is reshaping Tashkent food. Its owner never trained formally in Italy, but lived and cooked there, bringing back a version of pizza filtered through the Uzbek habit of feeding people until they cannot move.
Green House (Pushkin Street, Center)
Up on Pushkin Street near the center, Green House is a bakery and cafe that most people associate with pastries and American-style brunch items. This is fair because their cinnamon buns and espresso-cake game is strong. What fewer people know is that their weekend best wood-fired pizza Tashkent offering has been quietly running since 2020, served from a mobile wood-fired oven they wheel into their courtyard garden. The pizza menu changes every two weeks and usually features five or six options. A recent iteration included a Smoked Duck with onion marmalade and gorgonzola that I still think about, and a Mushroom and rosemary pizza where the mushrooms were foraged from the Chimgan mountains about 90 kilometers outside Tashkent. Dough is cold-fermented for 72 hours, giving it a sourdough-adjacent depth that you do not expect from a bakery. Seating is exclusively in the courtyard, which is gorgeous in spring and autumn but punishing in summer heat and, of course, unavailable when it rains. This is a Saturday and Sunday affair, 12:00 to 17:00 only, and when it is gone, it is gone. Following their Instagram is the only way to know what that weekend's menu looks like. I have watched people show up at 16:45 and find only the Margherita remaining, which is still excellent but limiting.
What to Order / See / Do: Check their Instagram story the night before to see the weekend menu. Get there before 13:30 for full selection. Pair a pizza slice with their house kombucha.
Best Time: Saturday or Sunday, 12:30-13:00. Courtyard fills fast. Do not come after 15:00 in peak summer because the sun has no mercy out there.
The Vibe: Rustic garden, long communal tables, often families with children. Loud but in a cheerful way. A minor annoyance is that the courtyard has zero shade infrastructure, so bring a hat or sunglasses.
Local Tip: If you are there on a slow Sunday afternoon, ask the baker if they have any aged dough scraps left. They sometimes press these into flatbread with olive oil and salt and hand them out free as snacks while you wait.
Tashkent Connection: Green House represents a broader trend of Tashkent food entrepreneurs treating pizza as seasonal and artisanal rather than everyday fuel. It also shows how the city's growing number of specialty bakeries have become multi-hyphenate operations that blur the line between breakfast spot and dinner venue.
~~Dario Mazzola (Yunusabad District)
I first found Dario Mazzola on a friend's recommendation who said, "Do not look at the interior, just eat the pizza." This sounds like faint praise until you walk in. The Yunusabad neighborhood is a Soviet-era residential block maze, and Dario Mazzola sits on the ground floor of one of these utilitarian apartment buildings with a facade that looks like a tax accountant's office. Inside, the decor is early-2000s Italian restaurant postcard aesthetic, and I mean that as both description and warning. However. The pizza is excellent. Dario is from Campania, specifically near Salerno, and he has been in Tashkent for over twelve years married to an Uzbek woman from the Fergana Valley. His Fior di Latte Margherita uses a local dairy's mozzarella that he has been training the suppliers on for years to get the moisture content right. His Marinara, just tomato, garlic, oregano, and olive oil, is the tightest expression of dough craft in Tashkent in my opinion, restrained but impeccable. Sunday lunch is the busiest time because Fergana-Valley extended families descend on this part of Yunusabad and Dario's place feeds twenty or more person groups who reserve the long back tables. If you come as a solo diner, you might feel slightly out of place on Sundays, but the staff are unfailingly warm. The wine list is entirely Italian and reasonably priced by Tashkent standards.
What to Order / See / Do: The Marinara if you want to test the dough alone. The Sunday Primi Piatti tasting menu if available, it changes weekly and includes pasta.
Best Time: Monday through Wednesday evening, 19:00-21:00. Sunday is packed with family groups; go during the week for a quieter meal.
The Vibe: Feels like someone's Italian uncle's basement restaurant. Fluorescent lighting does not flatter anyone. But the food is not trying to look pretty, it is trying to taste right, and it does.
Local Tip: Dario occasionally visits the Chorsu Bazaar on Saturday mornings to source vegetables. If you happen to meet him there, mention you ate at his restaurant. He will almost certainly insist on buying you tea at the nearby chaikhana, and these are some of the best conversations about Tashkent I have ever had.
Tashkent Connection: Dario's story mirrors that of several Italian men who arrived in Tashkent during the construction boom of the early 2010s and stayed for love. His restaurant is now a neighborhood institution in Yunusabad, a pizza place that locals recommend to each other rather than one discovered online.
Stroganina Bar Pizza Section (Street 19, Yakkasaray District)
Stroganina Bar is primarily known for its raw fish and northern Russian cuisine, a bizarrely perfect fit for Yakkasaray's increasingly eclectic dining corridor. What has evolved unexpectedly over the past three years is its pizza section, which started as a bar snack concept and has become a legitimate destination in its own right. The oven here is gas-fired rather than wood, but the head pizzaiolo, an Uzbek woman trained at La Piazza before branching out, uses a hybrid technique that produces a crust with a blistered rim and a tender center. The menu is short, four pizzas at any given time, and the standout is a smoked salmon pizza topped with crème fraîche, capers, dill, and a squeeze of lemon that tastes like a frozen Siberian beach somehow made edible. There is also a kebab pizza, which sounds like a Swedish airport concept but uses Uzbek chopon-seasoned lamb and a garlic yogurt sauce that bridges two culinary traditions with surprising grace. The bar seating around the open kitchen is where you want to be. You eat pizza while watching someone behind you shuck oysters and someone else plate raw muktuk, and it is gloriously weird. The prices are slightly higher than neighborhood pizza spots, a full pizza runs around 180,000 to 250,000 so'm.
What to Order / See / Do: The smoked salmon pizza and the kebab pizza. Sit at the bar to watch the kitchen coordination, which is genuinely entertaining.
Best Time: Thursday or Friday evening, 20:00-22:00, when the bar energy peaks, and the kitchen has settled into its rhythm after the early dinner wave.
The Vibe: Dark, loud, stylish, occasionally overwhelming when the bar gets packed. The pizza section shares ventilation with the raw seafood prep area, which means there is a faint briny undertone to the air that will not be everyone's preference.
Local Tip: If you are ordering pizza as a bar snack rather than a full meal, they do half-pizzas upon request, but you have to ask before ordering. This is not on the menu.
Tashkent Connection: Stroganina Bar's pizza operation illustrates how real pizza Tashkent no longer lives in Italian-only restaurants. It shows up in Russian seafood bars and Uzbek fusion kitchens, making the pizza scene here genuinely harder to map but far more interesting.
Black Star Burger Pizza Pop-ups (Various Locations)
I know what you are thinking. Black Star Burger? The chain? The one with the star logo? Yes. Specifically, ignore the burger menu and focus on what happens when their chefs do pizza pop-ups. This started in 2023 as an internal creative project and has since become a semi-regular event their Tashkent-headquartered team runs in collaboration with the brand's test kitchen. The pizzas range from creative (a plov-inspired pizza with cumin-spiced rice, carrots, and lamb renditions) to straightforward Margheritas that have no business being as good as they are. There is no fixed venue, and the pop-ups happen three to four times a year, usually announced two weeks in advance on their Instagram. Past locations have included a rooftop on Amir Timur Street, the courtyard of the Hyatt Regency, and, memorably, a converted textile factory in the Sergeli industrial zone where they set up a portable gas oven and fed 200 people in four hours. The black star aside, the quality of ingredients is unusually high because the supply chain is shared with the mothership burger operation, which has direct import relationships for cheeses and cured meats.
What to Order / See / Do: Whatever the "special of the event" pizza is, plus their signature cream-cheese-and-pickle pizza, which sounds like a dare and is actually addictive.
Best Time: Whenever the pop-up is announced. Doors open between 12:00 and 13:00. Pizzas sell out, often within ninety minutes.
The Vibe: Casual, young, Instagram-heavy, energy of a street food festival even when the execution is restaurant-grade. The main drawback is the almost total lack of seating at most pop-up events. You eat standing or on curbs.
Local Tip: Sign up for their Telegram channel, not just Instagram. Some pop-ups are either Telegram-only announced or have a two-hour Telegram advance window before the Instagram post goes live.
Tashkent Connection: Black Star Burger is Tashkent's biggest culinary export story, born from an Uzbek concept that expanded globally. Their pizza pop-ups are a way of giving back to the local food community and testing concepts that might eventually become permanent items elsewhere. Eating pizza here is eating a small piece of Tashkent's global food ambition.
Bakery Karavan (Navoi Street, near the Alisher Navoi Opera)
Near the Alisher Navoi Opera and Ballet Theater on Navoi Street, Bakery Karavan is a daytime operation that most opera-goers walk past without a second glance. This is a mistake. Inside, alongside an impressive display of Uzbek flatbreads and European-style loaves, there is a wood-fired oven that produces two types of pizza by the slice from 11:00 to 15:00 daily. One is always a Margherita-style with fresh tomato and basil. The second rotates, and previous rotations have included a Tarkhuna (green tarragon) pizza reflecting a beloved Uzbek soda flavor, a potato and rosemary version, and a four-cheese blend that included local qurut. The slices are priced at 25,000 to 35,000 so'm, making this by far the most affordable entry on this list. The opera benches across the street, shaded by zelkova trees planted during the 1960s Soviet beautification campaigns, make for a perfect place to eat your slice and people-watch. The bread-baking happens continuously, so the aroma is extraordinary. Do not come after 16:00, because they close the kitchen and take the remaining dough home. This lunch-hour-only model is common in Tashkent bakeries, and tracking it requires adjusting your meal habits rather than expecting the city to adjust for you.
What to Order / See / Do: Buy one of each slice option. Walk across the street to the benches. Eat under the trees and watch the opera building's facade in afternoon light.
Best Time: 11:30-13:30 Tuesday through Saturday. Mondays are unpredictable because the bakery sometimes uses Monday to prep new doughs and only offers one slice type.
The Vibe: Literal oblivion from anyone passing by. No atmosphere to speak of, it is a bakery counter with a standing ledge and a napkin dispenser. The charm is entirely in the food and the logistics of eating it across the street.
Local Tip: On Fridays between 12:00 and 13:00, the baker's son sometimes mans the oven and is far more willing to experiment. I had a lagan (a local herb) and ovsyanka (cottage cheese) slice from him that never made it to the regular menu.
Tashkent Connection: The Alisher Navoi Opera is Tashkent's cultural masterpiece, a building whose construction involved Japanese POWs after World War II. Having a pizza-by-the-slice option steps from it is one of those micro-contradictions that define this city: Central Asian, Soviet, Italian, and all happening simultaneously on a single sidewalk.
~~Kish Mish (12th Block, Yashnobod District)
In the 12th residential block of Yashnobod, far from the city center's restaurant clusters, Kish Mish does not advertise pizza on its menu. You will not find it on Google Maps as a pizza destination. But every Thursday evening, the owners convert part of their dining room into a pop-up pizzeria using a horno they built into their backyard during the 2020 lockdown. The owner's daughter, a student at the Tashkent Culinary Academy, makes the dough, and her mother supervises the toppings. The pies are a Uzbek-Italian hybrid: the base is a leavened dough with a faint sweetness similar to the dough used in samsa, and the toppings include pomegranate molasses, grilled vegetables, cumin lamb, and walnut sauce alongside mozzarella and parmesan. There is no sign outside, and finding the place requires following directions that locals share via WhatsApp groups rather than public maps. It is cash only. The weekly crowd of thirty to forty people fills the converted dining room, and you are seated wherever a chair is available. The pomegranate and walnut pizza, which is not quite a Mughlai concept but borrows from the same tradition, is outstanding. The wine, when available, is Georgian rather than Italian, ordered from a supplier in the Chilanzar wholesale market.
What to Order / See / Do: The pomegranate-walnut pizza and the cumin lamb. Arrive before 19:00 or risk being turned away when all seats are taken.
Best Time: Thursday, 19:00-21:30. This is the only night it happens.
The Vibe: Someone's home, warmly lit, low ceilings, family-style service. You will almost certainly be seated next to a stranger and end up discussing Tashkent politics and where to find the best non. Minimal ambiance but maximum warmth.
Local Tip: Call the number listed on their Telegram page exactly one week in advance to reserve a seat. They do not take reservations further out than that because the daughter's class schedule sometimes changes.
Tashkent Connection: Kish Mish is evidence of how authentic pizza in Tashkent has trickled down from Italian expats and trained returnees into home kitchens, family experiments, and community-run evenings. It is the least commercial pizza experience in this guide and, in many ways, the purest.
~~Milano Pizza by Aurus (Southern Circular Road, near Sergeli)
Out near the Sergeli district along Tashkent's ring road, Milano Pizza by Aurus sits in a commercial area better known for auto parts shops and discount furniture showrooms. The restaurant opened in 2022 and is part of a group that operates food concepts out of Tashkent's expanding suburban retail strips. The interior is modern, aggressively so, with LED-lit walls and EDM playlists at a volume that suggests the designer thought they were building a nightclub rather than a pizza restaurant. The pizza, however, is genuinely competent, and the Milano Special, a four-cheese pie with a garlic butter crust edge, is among the richest things I have eaten in Tashkent. The Margherita uses a baking process in a revolving stone oven that delivers a consistent, evenly browned pie about every six minutes. They make their mozzarella in-house from imported powder and local milk, a hybrid process that produces a cheese with the stretch of Italian mozzarella and the milder flavor that appeals to Uzbek palates accustomed to dense, salted curds. Their takeaway system is the most streamlined in the city, with a dedicated online ordering platform and delivery radius covering most of southern and central Tashkent within 30 minutes. For families and groups who want reliable wood-fired, or at least stone-fired, pizza without the adventure of seeking out one of the other spots on this list, Milano Pizza fills an important gap.
What to Order / See / Do: The Milano Special and the Tartufo pizza with truffle oil. Order takeaway if the noise inside bothers you, most people do.
Best Time: Lunch, 12:00-14:00, when the music is lower and families with young children dominate. Evening becomes louder and is geared toward the after-work crowd.
The Vibe: Good food trapped in a room trying too hard to be cool. Service is professional and fast, but the dining atmosphere is not conducive to conversation. Families with children enjoy the energy; couples looking for a romantic dinner should go elsewhere.
Local Tip: Their takeaway packaging includes a small sachet of homemade chili flakes that has become a minor cult item. Ask for extras; they usually oblige with a few more packets thrown in.
Tashkent Connection: Milano Pizza represents the commercialization of Tashkent's pizza culture, the moment when "good enough" operators with capital entered the market. It is not the most exciting entry on this list, but its efficiency and growing suburban footprint say something important about how pizza has normalized in Tashkent's dining habits beyond the center city.
When to Go / What to Know
Tashkent's pizza scene runs on a different clock than you might expect in Europe. Lunch is the prime eating window for most bakeries and casual spots, 11:30-14:00, while finer pizza restaurants focus on the 18:30-21:00 dinner band. Thursday through Saturday evenings are peak across all venue types. January and February see the fewest tourists but also some of the best cooking, as chefs have fewer covers and more time to experiment. August is brutally hot, and any venue with outdoor seating, the Green House courtyard in particular, becomes nearly unusable. Cash remains king at smaller places like Kish Mish, and even places that accept cards sometimes run into terminal issues, so carrying 500,000 to 1,000,000 so'm in backup cash is not paranoid, it is practical. Tipping is not mandatory but rounding up or leaving 10% is increasingly expected at sit-down restaurants. For locations without addresses easily found on Google Maps, Mapbox or Yandex Maps tend to have better coverage for Tashkent's residential areas.
Frequently Asked Questions
How easy is it to find pure vegetarian, vegan, or plant-based dining options in Tashkent?
Finding strictly vegan restaurants is still difficult, but vegetarian options have expanded significantly in Tashkent since around 2019. Most traditional Uzbek dishes are meat-heavy, though plov can sometimes be found without meat at chaikhanas during religious fasts. International cuisine restaurants, including the pizza spots in this guide, are where vegetarians have the most flexibility. Green House, La Piazza, and Carlo Giuliano all reliably have multiple vegetarian pizza options on any given day. Dedicated vegan labeling is rare; you will need to ask staff directly about butter, eggs, and dairy. A few Raw Cafe and Indian restaurant options in the city explicitly serve vegan meals and have become popular with the local vegan community since 2021.
Are there any specific dress codes or cultural etiquettes to keep in mind when visiting local spots in Tashkent?
There is no formal dress code at any restaurant in Tashkent, including the upscale options on Shota Rustaveli and Amir Timur streets. However, Tashkent remains a relatively conservative city compared to Baku or Istanbul, and wearing shorts and sleeveless tops at local chaikhanas outside the center may draw stares. At the pizza restaurants covered in this guide, casual dress is universally accepted. Do remove shoes if you are invited to a home dining situation, such as the Kish Mish pop-up. When invited to share bread, tear it with your right hand. Tashkent restaurants do not check IDs as rigorously as Western establishments, but under-25s may occasionally be questioned at bars attached to restaurants late at night.
What is the one must-try local specialty food or drink that Tashkent is famous for?
Green tea, specifically the black-and-green tea served at every chaikhana in the city, is the cultural anchor beverage of Tashkent. Choy (tea) is served free at most sit-down meals and is available at the Chorsu Bazaar's tea house in enormous pots for a few thousand so'm. Food-wise, Tashkent's version of plov (osh) is distinctive for its use of the "zirvak" technique, where meat, onions, and carrots are fried together before rice is added, and chickpeas and barberries give it a sweet-savory character that differs from Samarkand or Fergana plov. The Tashkent non, a round flatbread cooked in a tandoor and stamped with a decorative pattern before baking, is another daily staple. Eating non, which costs roughly 5,000 to 10,000 so'm at a neighborhood bakery, while sitting cross-legged on a tapchan (a raised outdoor platform) is among the most Tashkent experiences you can have.
Is the tap water in Tashkent to drink, or should travelers strictly rely on filtered water options?
Tashkent tap water is treated and technically meets local safety standards, but most residents do not drink it unfiltered due to taste, mineral content, and aging pipe infrastructure in certain districts. Hotels and restaurants typically provide filtered or bottled water, and the city's commercial water filtration stations, found in almost every neighborhood, sell 5-liter containers for around 4,000 to 6,000 so'm. At home, most Tashkent families use jug-style carbon filters or reverse osmosis systems rather than drinking directly from the tap. Travelers with sensitive stomachs should stick to bottled water for the first few days while adjusting, and ice in drinks at central restaurants is almost always made from filtered water, but confirm at smaller or more remote establishments.
Is Tashkent expensive to visit? Give a realistic daily budget breakdown for mid-tier travelers.
For a mid-tier traveler staying in a three-star hotel or a reputable Airbnb, excluding international flights, a realistic daily budget in Tashkent is 700,000 to 1,200,000 Uzbek so'm, roughly 55 to 95 USD. A meal at a quality local restaurant like those in this guide runs 80,000 to 250,000 so'm per person including a drink. Budget an additional 30,000-50,000 so'm for a lunch slice-and-stand-up option at a place like Bakery Karavan. Taxis via Yandex Go within the city cost 8,000 to 25,000 so'm for most trips. A hotel room in the three-star range runs 400,000-800,000 so'm per night depending on season and location, with the Amir Timur and Shota Rustaveli areas commanding higher prices. Entry to most museums and landmarks is under 30,000 so'm, with the State Museum of History and the metro ride each costing well under 5,000 so'm. You can manage a perfectly comfortable four to five day Tashkent trip for under 500 USD excluding flights if you eat mostly at local restaurants and take taxis rather than renting a car.
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