Eat Here Now is a first look at some of the newest, hottest restaurants around – the ones we think are worth visiting. We dine once, serve forth our thoughts, and let you take it from there.

There’s never a reason to say no to hand-pulled noodles.

Especially if you’re at Uzbegim, a new Inner Richmond restaurant that blends the meaty cuisine of Uzbekistan with olive oil-driven bounty of the eastern Mediterranean. The menu is expansive — spanning Greek salad, babaganoush, and lamb ribs — yet it’s the noodles that steal the show. 

In particular, the qovurma lagman, or “fried noodles,” embodies everything that’s appealing about the food of Central Asia. The bowl filled with beef, tomato, onion, and herbs, topped with crispy noodles for extra texture, has bold flavors, plentiful oil, and wonderfully supple noodles. It alone is reason to check the place out.

Uzbek restaurants are hard to come by, but in less than a year, San Francisco has gone from zero to two. (The other is Lower Nob Hill’s more narrowly tailored Sofiya.) At each, vegetables take a back seat, while beef drives and lamb rides shotgun. Uzbegim chef-owner Anvar Akhmedov chose the Inner Richmond for its population of immigrants from the former Soviet Union — “the Russian people love our food,” he says — but also because the space used to house the Pakistani restaurant Chaska, whose tandoor oven he inherited.

A commitment to serving dishes from a wide geographical area owes itself to Akhmedov’s wide-ranging career, which took him from his native Samarkand, a 2,400-year-old city on the Silk Road, to London and San Francisco. He has worked in kitchens from Presidio Social Club to The Chapel — and, for the last seven years, at Jackson Square members-only club The Battery. 

He’s adamant about sourcing, even going to the trouble of shipping a particular type of flaxseed oil from Uzbekistan. Rice is another area where there will be no compromise; Akhmedov wants only the long-grained red-brown variety from the Fergana Valley. “We are going to make the plov exactly like we cook it in my country,” he says.

Rice aside, Uzbegim is a hearty, beef-it’s-what’s-for-dinner kind of place. Plov, a pilaf that’s Uzbekistan’s national dish, takes a mound of seasoned rice and tops it with slow-cooked beef, carrots, fried chickpeas, onion, and lemon, plus a quail egg for good measure. Mantu, a plate of four chunky, beef-and-onion dumplings with labneh for dipping, offers a tangy complement. And there are kebabs, including roasted lamb, served mezze-style alongside paper-thin pita, pickled onions, and salad. Akhmedov notably grills over charcoal to impart everything with a pleasant smokiness.

He makes up for all the meatiness with some intriguing spins on hummus, including one made with artichokes and drizzled with pistachio pesto. There’s also a wide array of pickled vegetables and salads, from Greek, caprese, and Caesar to an unexpected arugula-burrata platter with soba dressing.

Whereas Sofiya’s dining room is decorated with traditional folk costumes, Uzbegim’s is less formal, with maps and posters of figures from Uzbek history, plus a deli case stuffed with kebab ingredients. Two intricately patterned chandeliers bump up the ambience a bit. An additional dining room is due to open soon, doubling the footprint.

The restaurant has some growing pains to deal with; namely, laminated menus with some (but not all) prices written in black Sharpie, leaving diners guessing at the cost of dishes that are unmarked. There is no website and no social media presence — complicated by the existence of a vigorously self-promoting, Michelin Bib Gourmand-holding restaurant of the same name in Tennessee. 

Still, in a city with few neighborhoods that can be described as unexplored, Geary Boulevard remains a reliable place of culinary discovery. And Uzbegim’s vast menu offers plenty of delights.