Food in Almaty

Landlocked does not mean bad fish, either. Akami, Sashimi Club and Sumosan are where I would go for the fresh stuff.

• Komok — the pulled beef sandwich.
• Red Beer Bar — burgers.
• Make Love Pizza — any pizza on the menu.
• Unapasta — the bolognese, and there is always good music on.
• Beefeater — kotlety with kimchi, which sounds like a collision and is not.
• Aroma — the shakshuka, in one of the best yards in the city.
• Green Cafe — Tetya Gulya's place, legendary among people who grew up here. Comfort food, and that is the whole of it. Google carries no listing under that name, so the pin is the beshbarmak counter it stands beside, inside the Green Bazaar — a landmark to walk to, not the door itself.
• Paradise, Dostyk 50 — ganbyam, tsomyan, lagman, and the manty: big, hinkali-style dumplings.
• Sandyq, Abylai Khan 55 — Kazakh cooking read through a modern kitchen. Twice, good both times, and the dish to go for is the beshbarmak: it is on the beshbarmak page with the rest of them.
• Coffeeon SaiGon, Kabanbay Batyr 122 — the pho bo, and one of the best bowls of it in the city. I eat it here with friends, and the room is reliably full of Americans, which is a signal in itself.
• Cece, Makataev 45/1 — an Asian kitchen in a basement one block off the Green Bazaar. Ramen and karaage, and a cocktail bar that is half the reason to go.
• J.Z. Peking Duck, Zeina Shashkin 1 — the duck it is named after, and the hot pot if there are enough of you to justify one.
• Qaimaq, Abay 46a — Kazakh cooking, several visits, and the kuyrdak in the photograph below.

Sandyq is the outlier on that list in two ways. It is a proper restaurant rather than somewhere to eat quickly — listings put it at 20,000 to 25,000 ₸ a head, which is several times anything else above, and that is their figure rather than a bill I have kept. And it sits at Abylai Khan 55, the same address as the 24-hour place with the irimshik latte, so one building will do you a Kazakh dinner and then a coffee at five in the morning. Checked 28 August 2026.

Qaimaq is the cheaper way to eat the same kind of food, and I should be straight about what that is worth: it is my experience over several visits rather than a bill I can show you, and the listings do not back me up — 2GIS puts the average at 25,000 ₸ a head, level with Sandyq. What differs is the floor rather than the ceiling. Google's own per-person band for Qaimaq starts at 5,000 ₸, because you can come in for a samsa and a soup and leave, and a dinner at Sandyq does not work that way. Abay 46a, open to midnight, 4.6 from more than twelve hundred Google reviews. Both figures read 30 August 2026.

Coffeeon SaiGon sits at Kabanbay Batyr 122, which puts it on the street this site already tells you to walk — Fika and Argymaq are at 104, a few minutes down the same pavement. It was Vietcafe before it was Coffeeon, it runs 10:00 to midnight daily, and its own listing puts the pho bo at 3,980 ₸ and the tom yum at 4,580 ₸. Those are their numbers, read 30 August 2026, not a bill I have kept — but 4.8 from more than seven hundred ratings on 2GIS is not a fluke.

Cece is the one with the bar, and its claim to fame is worth stating precisely, because it travels as "one of the world's top 50 bars" and that is not what it is. Cece is on 50 Best Discovery — the guide the organisation behind The World's 50 Best Bars keeps of places its academy recommends. It is a directory, not a ranking: Barmaglot here is on it too, and nobody is in a numbered position. That is still a real thing to have: the people who rank the world's bars went out of their way to write up a basement in Almaty, describing cocktails built one to a film, and putting the average drink at about $11.

Downstairs it is a noodle kitchen — 4.9 from over fifteen hundred ratings on 2GIS, which is the highest score of anything on this page — open midday to midnight, with most dishes between 1,800 and 4,800 ₸ on their own delivery menu. It is a block from the Green Bazaar, on the street that bounds the market square to the north, so it pairs with a morning at the market better than anything else I would send you to.

If you eat one thing in this city that is actually ours, make it beshbarmak — boiled meat and wide noodles, the food Kazakhs miss most when they live abroad. It has its own page: what separates a good one from a sad one, why the horse meat is nothing to fear, and the places I have eaten it, scored.

Nearly everything worth carrying back from this city is edible, and most of it is in the same covered market the beshbarmak page sends you to.