Chef's Programme
(from 12 September to 20 November 2025)

Conceived as a living body nourished through shared experiences, Recipes for Broken Hearts will see, among other events, ambitious culinary activations unfold over the ten-week period at the biennial’s Café Oshqozon. Meaning ‘stomach’ and ‘vessel for cooking’ in Uzbek, the café will feature menus by renowned international and local chefs inspired by recipes for physical and emotional healing and the spirit of conviviality, allowing you to taste the biennial themes and looking at shared meals and recipes as a form of learning. The activations at Café Oshqozon will celebrate the rich cultural exchanges that define the region, exploring how food, tradition and history converge.

Saidakmal Vahobov and Qand Team (Uzbekistan) 
12 September, 18:00 
14 September, 18:00 
Duration: 2 hours

Saidakmal Vahobov is the founder of Qand, an Uzbek brand that creates artisanal handmade sweets inspired by the unique flavours and ingredients of Uzbekistan. Vahobov and his team have developed a special dinner menu that awakens warm memories and emotions by playing around the role of sweet tastes, so central for the Uzbek palate. The menu will include katlama with green onions, and Bukhara kaymak; arugula salad with watermelon and kurt; and javari sorghum soup with katyk and Samarkand bread. Its centerpiece is dumbul-palov with herbs and navat crumbs, ending with the debut of a new ice cream made with Qand’s navat and Bukhara tea. This celebrates ice cream’s regional roots; “ice cream-like” desserts in Persia and Central Asia predate Europe’s by nearly two millennia.

Lilian Cordell (UK)
19 September, 20:30 
20 September, 18:00 
Duration: 2 hours

Lilian Cordell is a British chef and author of Miriam’s Table, a cookbook that celebrates Bukharian Jewish cuisine. The book is a tribute to her mother, Miriam, and features traditional recipes passed down through generations. Through the Bukhara Biennial, she will bring these recipes, which are alive in the Bukharian diaspora, back to their place of origin. Among the dishes she will share is the famous green palov called bukhsh, a fragrant rice dish prepared in a muslin bag with a generous quantity of fresh herbs such as cilantro, dill, and spinach, combined with rice and lamb. 

Elena Reygadas (Mexico) 
23 September, 18:00 
24 September, 18:00 
Duration: 2 hours

Mexican chef Elena Reygadas, widely celebrated for her commitment to sustainable gastronomy and regional ingredients, will trace the migratory journey of plants such as the tomato and chilli from the Americas to Central Asia, where they have become integral to Uzbek cuisine. Through a culinary exploration rooted in historical exchange, Reygadas will illuminate how food carries memory, resilience, and transformation across cultures and geographies. Her menu for the Biennial reflects this dialogue: mole blanco, traditionally prepared for weddings in Mexico, paired with Bukharan seasonal yellow carrots; Uzbek bread reimagined with a Mexican touch; and refreshing aguas frescas made with local melons and horchata from regional rice.

Pavel Georganov (Uzbekistan) 
3 October, 18:00 
4 October, 18:00 
Duration: 2 hours

Tashkent based chef Pavel Georganov’s project will reimagine home cooking for the public table. Inspired by childhood memories, his culinary practice revives dishes traditionally prepared only at home—meals bound by unspoken rules that keep them off restaurant menus. At the Bukhara Biennial, Georganov will present food merging these deeply local, memory-laden recipes with subtle elements from contemporary global cuisines. Using local ingredients with playful fusion, Georganov will craft an experience of a family kitchen through the lens of the restaurant table, rekindling the flavours people have loved since childhood in a form they have never seen before.

Fatmata Binta (Sierra Leone)
10 October, 18:00 
11 October, 18:00 
Duration: 2 hours

Fatmata Binta draws upon her Fulani heritage to explore food cultures across West and Central Africa. Through her project, she highlights the culinary wisdom, resilience, and sustainable practices of itinerant communities, challenging static notions of identity and place. By bringing Fulani traditions into dialogue with Central Asian contexts, Binta’s work reveals unexpected resonances between nomadic ways of life and the shared histories embedded in food. One such thread is sorghum, a drought-resistant vital grain that sustains both West and Central African communities and the people of Karakalpakstan (northwestern Uzbekistan), where it is deeply woven into cooking and appears across both culinary traditions in different forms.

Bahriddin Chustiy (Uzbekistan) 
17 October, 18:00 
18 October, 18:00 
Duration: 2 hours

Bahriddin Chustiy will present a programme that celebrates Uzbekistan’s rich culinary heritage through immersive storytelling and shared meals. Known for his large-scale gastronomic events and deep knowledge of national traditions, Chustiy will bring his signature blend of craft, history, and hospitality to the Biennial, offering guests an authentic taste of Uzbekistan’s culinary identity. Drawing on his gastronomic tours across the country, he plans to introduce a wide spectrum of regional dishes and flavours, highlighting the diversity of local ingredients and culinary practices that define Uzbekistan’s food culture, which reflects its multi-ethnic and multicultural identity. His menu shows us that food in Uzbekistan is so much more than just palov. 

Ekaterina Enileyeva (Uzbekistan), Aleksandr Tolkachev (Uzbekistan), Vladimir Kogay  (Uzbekistan) 
24 October, 18:00 
25 October, 18:00 
Duration: 2 hours

A team of Tashkent-based chefs bring local ingredients into dialogue with global culinary techniques, developing artistic collaborations and curating bespoke fine dining experiences and contributing to the development of contemporary Uzbek cuisine. For the Biennial, their project explores the art of illusion — reimagining familiar Uzbek flavours through unexpected transformations that engage all the senses. In their vision, vegetables turn into caviar, while fruits reveal unexpected savoury notes. The chefs also respond to the Café Oshqozon site with a mulberry ice cream inspired by the living tree that grows there

Zuri Camille de Souza (India/France) 
7 November, 18:00 
8 November, 18:00 
Duration: 2 hours
 

Zuri Camille de Souza, an Indian cook based in Marseille, works at the intersection of ecology, heritage, and the senses. Her culinary practice draws from her Goan roots and diasporic upbringing to explore seasonality, storytelling, and collective memory. At the Bukhara Biennial, she will craft a flower-based dinner in which each dish becomes an ode to a local ingredient or cooking technique from Bukhara and its surroundings. Drawing connections between Mughal and Timurid worlds, de Souza will create a table setting inspired by Uzbek miniature painting, merging food and visual tradition in a multisensory tribute to place.
 

Jeong Kwan (South Korea) and Subodh Gupta (India)
16-20 November

During the closing days of the Biennial, Korean Buddhist monk and chef Jeong Kwan joins Indian artist Subodh Gupta for a special programme celebrating vegetarian traditions connecting Korean temple cuisine and the rich heritage of Bihari vegetarian food. Jeong will also incorporate kimchi and doenjang (soybean paste) that she began preparing during the opening of the Biennial, weaving these slowly fermented staples into her dishes at the closing programme. She will also present her korean interpretation of palov in the Rice Cultures Festival. 

Attendance is strictly by reservation, as places are limited. 
Please book your table by sending us an email: rsvp@bukharabiennial.uz