The culturally curious will be able to get a taste of traditional Uzbek cuisine with the planned Valentine’s Day opening of Silk Road Cafe in downtown Hono­lulu.

The food is meat-centric, given the Uzbek people’s need for energy, said co-owner Mamura Yuldasheva.

Her husband, Akrombek “Aki” Yuldashev, owns a shoe manufacturing business in Uzbekistan with his brother, but the restaurant business will be a new one for the couple. They hope to expand to other locations.

Silk Road Cafe will offer authentic Uzbek food. “We wanted to cook food that we grew up eating,” she said.

For example: osh, a national dish known as the king of Uzbek foods. Osh has become known by other names, including plov, palov and — perhaps the most familiar — pilaf.

“Plov, palov, pilaf are all the same thing, just different adaptations and different recipes by different cultures in Central Asia and South Asia,” Yuldasheva said. “We call ours osh, and it was first made in our country. Since the main ingredients are all the same (rice, carrots, meat), they call them with similar-sounding names.”

The rice dish is made in large quantities for weddings and other events. It is seasoned with herbs, spices such as cumin, salt and pepper, and might include raisins or chickpeas.

“Weddings have 400 or 500 people attending, so they have to make osh so it feeds everybody,” she said. Two other courses are served first, “so when they serve osh, it means it’s time to go,” she explained.

Uzbek food is not spicy, but many men eat osh with hot peppers, similar to the small, blazing-hot Hawaiian chilies. “Some men are really strong. They take a bite of pepper and a bite of the osh,” she said. “I’ve never done that.”

The 400-square-foot restaurant will seat about 20. A few metered parking stalls near the building are usually full, but additional metered parking is available at the downtown post office.

Menu choices will include achichuk, a salad made with onions, tomatoes, cucumbers and dill, traditionally served with osh; lagman, a soup made with thick, hand-pulled noodles; shashlik kebab; and Uzbek-style naan bread, “commonly made in households and sold almost in every corner of the streets in Uzbekistan,” Yuldasheva said.

Uzbekistan is a former Soviet republic, and Hawaii’s Russian community will likely be happy about one Silk Road dish in particular. Little meat-and-onion-filled dumplings known in Russia as pelmeni, or in Uzbekistan as chuchvara, will be offered as a special, she said.

Yuldasheva has been in Hawaii since 2000; her husband moved here three years ago.

“We wanted to open a restaurant because we miss our country. … We don’t have anything here that reminds us of our culture,” she said. They’ve been welcomed in Hawaii and have seen how open most locals are to trying different cuisines.

Before moving to Oahu, Yuldasheva lived in Texas. “Here it’s more open and more diverse, and we wanted to take advantage of that to see if people like our food.”

The name Silk Road Cafe was chosen with the thought that far more people in Hawaii are aware of the historic Silk Road trade route from China to Europe than they are of Uzbek cuisine.

Uzbekistan was a major stop along the route. “When they stopped in Uzbekistan, the traders would rest, pick up more stuff to deliver, and eat food,” Yuldasheva said. She and her husband hope that when diners stop by, “they will get to know us and our culture.”

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