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Tashkent · Novza
The Original
The room where it began — 28 seats, original tandoor, the staff that's been there since day one.
Opened
2017
Novza, Tashkent — opened 2017
The Origin
One restaurant. One tandoor.
It started in 2017 on Novza street in Tashkent — a single dining room with twenty-eight seats and a wood-fired tandoor in the corner. The founders weren't restaurant people. They were a family that had cooked for other families for years, and decided one summer to do it for the city instead.
"The first month we didn't take a day off. We didn't know how. The tandoor was warm; people kept arriving."
Eight years on, the original Novza dining room is still open. The tandoor is still in the corner. Six other branches have opened across Uzbekistan, with a thirty-three-thousand-strong following on Instagram. The same family runs them.
In 2025, that family opened its first restaurant outside the country — not in a capital, not in a tourist trap, but two minutes from Al-Masjid an-Nabawi, in the heart of Madinah. The same tandoor. The same hands. New guests, from every corner of the world.
