Aug 11 2010

Käwap Restaurant For Another Birthday Celebration

Category: Anna's Photos,Eating Out,Friends,PicturesChrisM @ 7:00 pm

Another post where I’ve taken a few individual tweets and tidied them into one entry. 11th August was my mother-in-law’s birthday, the day after Ira and my wedding anniversary. We headed on downstairs to the new Azerbaijani restaurant located on the ground floor of our building. We hadn’t tried it before, and there was no one else there during our meal, so we were assured of their undivided attention 🙂 Losha’s parents (Igor and Natalya) joined us, and over all Anna was pretty well behaved.

First up we have a quick picture of a salad that was ordered. It doesn’t come out so well with a wobbly camera phone shot, but in the middle of the plate is a radish carved into a rose shape. Very pretty. Personally I have no idea how it tasted, as I’m not a huge fan of rabbit food (meat, potatoes and pasta are my favourite core ingredients), but no one seemed to complain.

Radish Rose - Really!

Radish Rose - Really!

They didn’t have any highchairs, and after trying to get Anna to repeat her previous good behaviour in such situations, we gave up and grabbed the one from our kitchen.

There was in fact no turkey sashliq despite it being on menu. This has happened in a few places in Astana. If you have your hopes set on a certain dish before you arrive, best to phone ahead and speak to someone first. Otherwise a good selection of various sashliqs (kebabs). We asked for something without any bone or lots of gristle (I love the taste of meat, but hate thinking about the fact that it used to be an animal. If steak wasn’t so tasty, I might have been converted into a vegetarian in another life. That would mean eating vegetables though. Anyway, I digress…). When the kebab arrived, it was on the bone still. The waitress didn’t seem to understand why we were surprised to see bone in a dish she recommended for having no bone.

Considering that the décor and ambience of the place was reasonably up market, the vodka & beer was reasonably priced. The baursaki were tasty, but most definitely reheated to make them seem over fresh. Better than stone cold and greasy to be honest 🙂 The chicken lyalya (spelling ?) shashliq was tasty. Basically minced chicken shaped into a sort of sausage shape.

Chicken Kebab - No Bones

Chicken Kebab - No Bones

At one point Anna seemed to get a bit bored, and decided to get the camera out. I’ve not yet checked the memory card to see the sort of shots achieved.

Anna In Her Highchair

Anna In Her Highchair

Finally, during a cigarette break outside, I took a quick picture of the restaurant name. I couldn’t step any further back, so had to take a diagonal shot. Luckily our WiFi signal just reaches downstairs to this point, so I was able to upload some pics without using up my KCell credit 🙂

I'll Rewrite This Caption When I Know How To Spell The Name

I'll Rewrite This Caption When I Know How To Spell The Name

oh, I’m hoping someone can correct me on the correct spelling in latin characters for the restaurant?

[edit]
Thanks to Oleg and Walton for their help with the spelling, I’ve updated the post to reflect this.

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7 Responses to “Käwap Restaurant For Another Birthday Celebration”

  1. Walton says:

    I believe the upsidedown e/schwa letter is closer to “a” than “o” And the y would be “u”, I think, so I suspect that Kauap would be better. I gather that means kebab in Kazakh? Azerbaijani?

    • ChrisM says:

      Thanks, I’ve gone with Oleg’s in the end, as I’ll never remember how to get my mouth around aua in the middle there 🙂

  2. Oleg Frantsuzov says:

    It’s Käwap, if you are inclined to use a fairly widespread modern Latin alphabet for Kazakh (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_alphabet#Correspondence_chart ).

    And it uses w for u, just like Welsh! 🙂

    • Oleg Frantsuzov says:

      Any chance ????????? also working here?

      • ChrisM says:

        lmao, still no chance. I need someone to work with me on that one, who is more confident about not losing MySQL tables accidentally when working with them 🙂 I tried manually fixing the character encoding, and also using a WP plugin. Neither worked very well. (Obviously I tried it out on a test blog first, wasn’t about to risk all the posts here 🙂 ).

    • ChrisM says:

      Thanks for the clarification, most appreciated. I’ve edited your URL to remove the closing bracket. My Welsh is worse than my Kazakh TBH, which is pretty sorry state of affairs 🙁

  3. ChrisM says:

    For our future reference, their telephone number is +7 7172 688023