The moment I heard that Almaty had a signature spicy noodle dish, I knew that I just had to try it.
Learning that laghman was imported here by members of the Uyghur community, it felt like the dish was a symbol of everything that I’ve learned Almaty (and Kazakhstan) stand for, a multinational and multiethnic society. The Uyghur community, originally based in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in Western China, has traditionally represented a gateway linking East Asia to Central Asia, where Kazakhstan is located. The dish, consisting of thick, hand-pulled, wheat noodles with a spicy sauce of meat and vegetables, is considered to be a descendent of lamian from China, which itself is a broad category of noodles prepared by various Chinese ethnic groups. Laghman’s relatives of note include Japanese ramen, as well as lo mein dishes prepared in the US. However, as hand-pulled noodles prepared primarily with lamb or beef, laghman is one of lamian’s closest relatives!
My laghman meals in Almaty have so far included dinners with language partners, late Sunday lunches in the sweltering heat, post-lesson snacks while laughing with friends over the mistakes we made in class, or quick meals in between classes at the Lagmanxana across the road from our university. I must say, my favorite variant so far has been a soupy form of the noodles, garnished with green onions and cheese – an elite comfort food when perfective and imperfective verbs have you in tears. I’m also particularly fond of one dish prepared with a leafy green topping, as well as a fried variant that’s called tsuman (Sound familiar? Linguistically it’s connected to what Americans might know as chow mein!)
Uyghur laghman joins a long list of cultural foods that, combined, create the rich fabric of modern Kazakh cuisine. Other members of this family include Uzbek plov, Ukrainian vareniki, Russian borscht, which all stand next to the Kazakh national dish of beshbarmak, made with horse meat and noodles. As we learn about Kazakhstan’s rich history of intermingling with other peoples and cultures over the centuries, whether this be through processes like trade, migration or colonization, I’m aware, as I chew on a piece of carrot from my meal, of everything that had to happen in order to bring this steaming plate of noodles before me. But then, I think about all of the processes that had to happen in order to bring me, an Indian-American PhD student studying the Russian language, to Almaty, Kazakhstan, in the first place.
And now, for the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The best laghman that I’ve tasted in Almaty, so far, has been at a tiny restaurant located just outside ADK, one of the city’s many shopping malls. It had no air conditioning and didn’t even show up on Yandex maps, which honestly should have been my first sign that this laghman was going to slay. Here, on that historical day, I spotted red chilis in the wild, in my food, scratching an itch for fiery food that I didn’t even realize I had. I’m going to spend my last few weeks in Kazakhstan enjoying one of my universally favorite foods in the world, sensationally spicy and slurp-able noodles.
Title VIII Research and Training Fellow
Fulbright-Hays Fellowship Recipient
Advanced Russian Language and Area Studies Program
Almaty, Kazakhstan, Summer 2023