Jalal-abad Chaikhana - Bishkek

Great local place with good food and a nice ambience. Seating is made up of a mix of regular tables and chairs, and traditional table seats. Staff does not speak English, but they have an English menu. Place does not serve alcohol.

This restaurant is located at the heart of Bishkek city, in front of the White House and has been one of the oldest businesses in Bishkek, going back to Soviet times, where it was a small student oriented restaurant. jalal-abad restaurant 's building is a Soviet era building with beautiful hand carved wooden exterior. It serves mainly traditional Kyrgyz meals including kebaps, samsa and other staple Kyrgyz foods. If you are vegetarian you can order vareniki or chychkan manty which use mashed potatoes inside the steamed dumplings. Also they have various salads without meat. Overall, customer service could be better, and meals do not have the wow factor. But it 's a solid place that provide solid meals.

The food here is good but nothing to talk about, I had the Shorpo and beef Shashlik. The Shorpo was good and had a nice flavour and the Shashlik was good just there wasn't much meat and a lot of it was fat. The service is bad most of the time the waitors/ waitresses just sat using their phones, to get their attention I kept having to walk up to them to ask questions. And for those of you that don't speak or read Kyrgyz/ Russian no one here speaks English and the whole menus in Kyrgyzs which doesn't make it a bad place or that they should change that is almost part of the adventure for the place it's just a heads up.

I visited this place twice, the first time, they took my order then they took very long time to tell me that half of my order is not available!and after I changed the un available dishes they ignored what I requested and never served them! The 2nd visit, I made the order and everything was served warm, not hot and even the bread was dry! After that I tried to order the hot sauce that comes with the Manti and Laghman they and even after showing the picture of the sauce from the same restaurant, they claimed they do not know it!

I visit this place every year when I come to Bishkek, but this time it was a total disappointment. Dastarkhan was sticky and dirty, there were too many beggars wandering between tables and disturbing people while they ate (three different beggars came to us during our 30 min stop there). And most importantly, there were no toilet papers, no soap and no bidet (or any container that could be used for this purpose) in the bathroom. Will never go there again.