The venerable central Asian rice dish plov is served with legends. One holds that Alexander the Great, having conquered what’s now the Uzbek city of Samarkand in the fourth century B.C., ordered his cooks to create a meal quick, plentiful, and hearty enough to sustain his army. Genghis Khan supposedly fed it to his troops, and Uzbek-born conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) after him. Plov is still prepared and consumed throughout the region, especially in the landlocked nation of Uzbekistan, where it’s the national dish.
Until two days after New Year’s, a meal that’s filled bellies for centuries and across hundreds of miles of Asian steppe had not (as far as we know) been offered for public consumption in Charlotte. But then a 27-year-old former chemical engineer named Sarvar Nazir, who had ached to start a venture of his own, opened a takeout restaurant in a South End ghost kitchen and decided to make plov the centerpiece of his menu.
In recent years, Charlotte’s become its own kind of culinary experiment, with cuisines and sub-cuisines seeming to sprout from the ground. Can central Asian cuisine find a foothold? Will the young partiers of South End come to nosh on plastic bowls of plov between $8 beers and excursions on the Pedal Pub?
Nazir does not know. He admits he’s operating on a little skill—he learned to prepare plov from his paternal grandfather—and a lot of hope. “We’re just sort of testing out the market to see if people enjoy the dishes or not,” Nazir tells me on a weekday afternoon in January. He walks me through a long corridor at South End Eats on West Summit Avenue, a warren of about 30 small kitchens where proprietors prepare takeout meals that customers pick up in front. Nazir operates Nomad PlovHouse from Unit 113, in back.
Sarvar Nazir, a chemical engineer by training, learned to cook plov from his grandfather, 77-year-old Anvar Nazirov, who immigrated to the United States in the late 1980s.
As of January, hours were roughly 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., and customers could order on-site or through Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub. “I’ll give this two, three, four months,” he says, “see how this really goes—see if Americans want this culinary experience in addition to everything else—and we’ll go from there.”
One reason Nazir is hopeful: For all its ties to the steppes of central Asia, plov is one iteration of a kind of rice dish found around the globe. Turkey has pilaf. Spain has paella. India has biryani. South Louisiana has jambalaya. It’s all fundamentally the same thing: a rice base with vegetables and meat, an affordable and nutrient-dense meal for working folks and, sometimes, conquering soldiers. Traditional Uzbek plov is made with mutton, onion, and shaved carrots, plus salt and cumin, in a large wok-like pot called a kazan. Nazir and his mother make the manti—coaster-sized Uzbek dumplings stuffed with beef and onion, and, if you want, potato—and prepare the chickpea, cucumber-and-radish, and tomato-cucumber-and-onion salads that accompany the plov.
Nazir says he’d never considered opening a restaurant until last year. He was born in New York City. His parents, Atabek Nazirov and Lola Nazirova, were born in Uzbekistan in the 1970s, when the country was part of the Soviet Union. (Nazir’s surname is the proper rendering of the Uzbek family name, he says; the “ov” and “ova” suffixes of his parents’ names are Soviet-era Russianizations.) During COVID, a family member who works in banking secured a job at Wells Fargo headquarters in Charlotte, and the family, tired of the expense and overpopulation of metropolitan New York, decided to move south.
Manti are large dumplings stuffed with beef, onion, and sometimes potato.
Nazir earned a chemical engineering degree from New York University in 2019 and landed an internship, then a job, with Auriga Polymers in Spartanburg, South Carolina. But he felt like part of a machine, he says: “It wasn’t my own, you know?” He worked as a medical researcher for a few years but found that unsatisfying, too. Then, he says, he began to hear people speaking Russian on occasion in Charlotte, and his mind swam with possibilities.
We discuss this at a picnic table beside South End Eats on a chilly day ideal for eating something as warm and comforting as plov. Nazir’s mother has joined us, as well as Anvar Nazirov, 77 and retired, the grandfather who taught him how to cook the dish. Nazir concedes that his grand plov venture is just getting started. But he does not lack ambition.
“Eventually, I want to open a lot of different locations,” Nazir says. “I just want everyday Americans to know about it and to have it every once in a while if they want to.”
GREG LACOUR is the editor.
Greg Lacour
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