Putting the K(yrgyz) in K-Town

Photographed and Co-Written for Gourmet with Alex Tatusian.  
Aleksey's voice is represented in normal type. Alex's additions are in italic

Nine years ago, I moved from Detroit to Los Angeles for graduate school and quickly fell in love with the city. Composed of migrant communities layered atop one another, the city reminds me of Kyrgyzstan, my home, and Central Asia more broadly. Los Angeles life is dispersed across decentralized networks of strip malls, parking lots, and informal gathering places, circulatingus like nomads. Restaurants here especially function as jailoos, high-altitude pastures pastoral Kyrgyz farmers retreat to in the summer, where migratory communities can gather for a time before scattering again.

Cafe Ordo, a small Kyrgyzstani restaurant improbably tucked away in the corner of a Koreatown strip mall, is one of these pastures. After only eating Kyrgyz food at home or in the occasional Chicago restaurant for decades, I was astonished to hear about it from a friend. Despite the fact that a handful of other Central Asian and Uyghur restaurants in Southern California serve some Kyrgyz dishes, Cafe Ordo is likely the only Kyrgyz restaurant in Southern California. It makes sense: based on the last U.S. Census numbers, the L.A. Kyrgyz population hovers around the low thousands.

Alex and I descend on the restaurant hungry. After we nestle our cars into the fenced-off parking lot and walk inside, Shahrizada Toktogulova, 40, co-owner with her husband Kurmanbek, up-nods from behind the counter to point us to a table. Compact, sweet, and funny—and an accountant by training—she arrived in Los Angeles four years ago. “My sister was already here,” she tells meafter sitting down at our table in a black and red chef’s smock and Crocs, “so we came too.”

The name “Ordo” refers to several things in the Kyrgyz language, but it roughly translates to a central public gathering space. This, she explains, is part of the ambition behind the restaurant: to create a sense of home,and a waypoint for Southern California’s scattered Kyrgyzstani community. “In the evenings, people will comejust to hang out,” she says. “They might reserve a samsa and come from far away just to eat and relax.” During the day, the dining room serves a more functional role, hosting mostly “people working nearby—delivery drivers, Uber drivers, taxi drivers, and students.”

Though larger clusters of Kyrgyzstanis live in Burbank, Downtown L.A., and nearby Irvine, no central hub really exists. So they chose Koreatown. At first she took a jobat Vespaio, a somewhat uppity downtown restaurant people go to before seeing a ballet around the corner. “I couldn’t really speak English yet. I worked as a busser, and while I was working there I practiced.” Her husband, Kurmanbek, 44, was working as a truck driver at the time and asked, “Why don’t we open a restaurant? There aren’t any Kyrgyz restaurants in Los Angeles.” In September 2024, they took the leap.

Show me a strip mall more L.A. than an L shape in K-town. This one has it all: Ordo, of course, a print shop, a salon, a Korean noodle house, and a Taekwondo studio. As Shahrizada, Aleksey, and I talk, kihaps (the explosive yells intended to focus the ki) from sparring matches next door punctuate the silences alongside the slapping of limbs against vinyl target pads. The restaurant seems to float in a kind of permeable stew: to dine there, your senses must accept inputs of all kinds, first from the busy kitchen and serene dining room, then from the strip mall, and finally from the whooshing adjacent intersection of 7th and Irolo. You’re never really just at Ordo.

Shahrizada and Kurmanbek got very lucky. She says they discovered upon opening that a nearby college accepts many Central Asian students, some of whom use the school as a means to obtain visas to the United States. Soon, many young Kyrgyz people were wandering in, astounded to find food they recognized in aneighborhood they didn’t.

I’ve never seen an American person in there, aside from the friends I’ve brought, but Sharhizada tells me with obvious pride, “Now more Americans are coming. A lotof Uzbeks come too. They tell us that our samsas taste like the ones they remember from home. They say that Uzbek restaurants here don’t use a real tandoor ovenlike we do, so ours tastes more authentic.”

Tandoor, manti, naan—Central Asian cuisine sops up techniques and flavors from every road that runs through Bishkek, the legacy of Silk Road trade and millennia of wriggling in and out of overlapping empires from all points of the compass. The food has become impossible to pin down. 

On an Ordo table, manti are not the delicate Armenian morsels of lamb or beef in dough with yogurt and thin tomato broth, but engorged dumplings the size of your fist, served with a piquant, spiced sauce closer in texture to passata. At each place setting, you’re invited to dip just about anything in pools of chili oil, similar to the kind you’d get at a Sichuan place, which you will eventually ask your server to replenish. Lepeshka (also called naan), too, emerges smooth and fragrant from that tandoor, but yeastier and chewier than you would expect from Desi kitchens, bulbous on the outside like a concave UFO.

The lagman—a hand-pulled noodle-and-meat stirfry which the Oxford Companion to Food notes is a Uyghur specialty and derived from liang mian, the Chinese/Taiwanese cold noodle—is Shahrizada’s sister’s recipe and something I can’t help but eat compulsively once served. After having my share, I usually wait a few minutes to see if Aleksey will take any more. If he doesn’t, I swipe more springy noodles through the accumulated jus and go to town. Ordo cooks plov, a one-pot tumble of rice, meat, and vegetables ubiquitous to Central Asia, closest to the way it’s made in Uzbekistan and southern Kyrgyzstan—rich with a meaty, fatty, aromatic base.

Historically, no one had really attempted to organize Central Asia’s ethnic minorities until the Russian Empirecame lumbering in. Later, fearful of a unified pan-Turkicpopulation, Soviet planners divided Central Asia into republics organized around newly formalized linguisticand ethnic categories: Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik. These “nationalities policies” attempted to transform Central Asian life, defined by shifting alliances and migration, into one that could be measured, bordered,and governed.

Kyrgyz culinary traditions as a result didn’t emerge froma vacuum, evolving from a shared nomadic pastoral life with Kazakhs and from centuries of contact with Uzbeks, Tajiks, Uyghurs, and Mongols. The result is a repertoire with regional inflections, not dramatic splits, nomad recipes wandering rather than settling down and building walls.

That fluidity comes through when I ask Shahrizada which dish she thought best represented Kyrgyz cuisine, “Usually I say lagman... Or kurdak, because I love it. And manti. A lot of Americans really love the manti.” She shifts in her seat and seems reluctant to settle on a single answer. The plov at Café Ordo, she explains, isn’t meant to stand in for anything official. “It’s not very traditional,” she says. “It’s more our home version. It’s Kyrgyz, but we make it our own way.”

No matter how personal, though, running a restaurant in L.A. is still no joke. When they opened, they started working at 5:30am and ended at 11pm. Now that they have some experience, they clock out at 5pm, leaving others to close the restaurant so they can spend time with their three children. They can’t shake the early mornings, though—word’s gotten out among Central Asian rideshare drivers, who come in waves through noon.

Shahrizada sits up: she has picked up on some signal I missed, and goes to help out in the kitchen for a second. We take some time to really look around. The dining room has an improvised feel, ad hoc and homey. Deep-set living room couches line the walls, inviting patrons to linger. This style of seating seems out of place in the United States, but it’s common in Central Asia, where hospitality and hanging out are central to dining. “The Koreans will be like, ‘Why did you put couches in? You should have put in harder chairs, or else people willwant to sit around for a long time!’” Sharhizada says while laughing when she returns. “And I told them, ‘In Kyrgyzstan we love to lounge and be comfortable andfeel like we can stick around.’”

Decoratively, there are no two ways about it: Cafe Ordo is gray. The vinyl floor is gray. The tablecloths are gray. The couches are gray, and the patterned pillows on them are gray. The chairs might be black, but I think they’re actually a dark gray. Only the colorful, pretty, likely hand-loomed textiles hanging on the dining roomwalls fight back against the post-Soviet palette.

Everyone says goodbye to Shahrizada when they leave. She’s quiet but warm. As we speak, I can tell she wishes we were customers and not journalists, but she doesher best to make us feel at home. Before and after she answers a question, she whispers “tak”, a kind of meaningless Russian function word that can at times feel like“so”, “OK”, “hmm”, or “well…”.

She misses Kyrgyzstan, she says. “I miss my family. I miss kumiz.” That’s fermented mare’s milk, which is very hard to find in the States. The closest thing you can get at Ordo is their excellent chalap, a thick, sour cow’s milk mixed with water and salt, often lightly effervescent. I’m amazed I can find even that here.

It feels both strange and unexpectedly affirming to see a Kyrgyzstani community slowly take shape in Los Angeles. Chicago has the largest Kyrgyzstani diaspora inthe United States, but Los Angeles' is growing. When I mention Chicago to Shahrizada, she laughs. “Oh yes,” she says. “They joke and call it the eighth oblast of Kyrgyzstan. I think Los Angeles is maybe the ninth.”

Shahrizada and Kurmanbek don’t seem to feel any burden of standard-bearing. The restaurant is neither meant to represent a nation nor showcase simplified dishes to appeal to non-Kyrgyzstanis. For Southern California’s Central Asian community, it exists as a center in a city without one, among the region’s fragmented terrain of freeways and suburbs. It expresses Kyrgyz cuisine through lingering and generosity (toward both Kyrgyzstani and not, alike) and through dishes that shiftslightly depending on who’s cooking and who’s eating. It isn’t fixed. But it’s a place to sit, eat, feel something like home, and stay a while before inevitably moving on.

Just before we get up to leave, Shahrizada brings us each a steaming samsa, a kind of mincemeat turnover straight outta the tandoor, structurally and phonetically related to samosas, the “sam” referring to the three points of the pastry in both Persian and Chinese. They’re phenomenal.

You pay at the counter at Ordo, and on the way up, I tell Aleksey that if she declines to charge us for them, we of the Fourth Estate must politely insist. As predicted, a minor tête-à-tête ensues. Armenia is not that far from Kyrgyzstan: I had a feeling this might happen, a contest of polite wills. English and Russian fly for a couple minutes until Shahrizada relents, not without a smile and an eyeroll. “That’s just not how we do things,” she says. Whether “we” means Cafe Ordo, Kyrgyzstanis, or Angelenos is anyone’s guess.