Order something you can't get at home

This is the one to order first, because it is the clearest example of what this page is about. Irimshik is a Kazakh curd: milk soured, then simmered for hours on a low flame until the whey has gone and what is left has turned golden-red. People here describe the taste as boiled condensed milk, and that is close.

So when the latte arrives tasting faintly of caramel, nothing has been added to make it do that — no syrup, no sugar. The caramel is what happens to milk left on the heat for half a day, and somebody has built a coffee around it. It is a properly made latte first and a novelty second, and the sweetness is judged rather than poured in: present, and then it stops.

The menu says 1,990 ₸. You will pay 2,189 ₸, because the 10% service charge goes on top — which is the whole reason the numbers on this site are till totals rather than menu prices. Checked 28 August 2026.

Tary keeps this branch open around the clock, on Abylai Khan at Makataev, in the same building as the ibis. That combination — central, 24 hours, and serving something you genuinely cannot order at home — makes it the answer to a question visitors ask a lot: where can I get a decent coffee at five in the morning on my first jetlagged day.

Bal means honey, and locals know the chain for its cakes — the medovik and the napoleon above all.

Here is the thing worth knowing: none of the baking is on the QR menu. Scan the code and you get breakfasts, soups, pasta and salads. The bureks and the pies live in the glass case by the till, and the only way to find them is to walk up and look.

They are also the cheapest thing in the building. A potato pastry is 270 ₸ — around fifty cents.

• Potato pirozhok — 270 ₸
• Burek with potato and onion — 370 ₸
• Sochnik with curd — 390 ₸
• Sweet burek with curd — 650 ₸
• Sweet burek with apple — 670 ₸
• Mini apple pie — 1,250 ₸
• Mini pear pie — 1,340 ₸

The cards are labelled in Kazakh and Russian only, which is the other reason people walk past them.

A raf is espresso whipped together with cream and sugar, and at Bal it is genuinely built on cream — which makes it heavy. That is worth knowing before you order, because it decides when to order it, not whether. On a hot afternoon it is the wrong drink. In October, when the city has turned cold and wet and you have come in off the street, it is exactly the right one.

Four of them, all 1,790 ₸: classic, honey, halva, and tary — roasted millet, a Kazakh pantry staple, and the one you cannot order at home. I have not scored any of them. Heavy drinks are not what I drink, so someone else's palate should judge these.

The rest of the list worth a foreigner's attention:

• Date ice latte — 1,350 ₸. The house describes it as a cold latte sweetened with dates rather than sugar.
• Bumble — 1,940 ₸.
• Iced coffee with urbech — 2,240 ₸. Urbech is a stone-ground nut paste from Dagestan. Not Kazakh, but not something you will meet at home either.

I scored the espresso 6 out of 10. A double came to 810 ₸ all in, service included. That is lower than anything on my coffee list, and it is the honest reason this page exists rather than a cafe card: come to Bal for the case, the breakfast and the terrace, and drink your espresso somewhere else.

Breakfast runs until 6pm, which is more useful than it sounds if you have spent the morning in the mountains. The village breakfast is 3,650 ₸ — potato wedges, fried mushrooms, white beans, chicken sausages and two fried eggs — and the prices across the menu are kind for what arrives.

There is a branch on Zhambyl with a covered terrace under the trees, and on a warm afternoon it is full of people who live here rather than people visiting. Google does not list that branch at all, which is a small demonstration of why locals use 2GIS.

One more thing, because almost nothing in English mentions it:Bal has prayer rooms. If that matters to how you plan a day, it is the kind of detail that decides where you stop for lunch, and you will not find it on the listing or the menu.