About Khorezm Art Restaurant
The Khorezm Art Restaurant was opened in 2008 in a converted section of the 1830s Allakuli Khan Madrasah — a working royal Islamic-school building inside Itchan Kala, near the palace of Tash-Hauli. The restaurant occupies the madrasah's central courtyard and adjacent ground-floor cells, with the original mud-brick architecture, hand-painted ceiling decorations, and traditional Khorezmian decorative motifs preserved throughout.
The kitchen offers national and European cuisine. Popular dishes include Mastava (the Uzbek rice-and-meat soup with vegetables, $4); Tukhum Barak (the regional dumpling stuffed with raw egg and filling, served with dill-yogurt sauce, $6); Khorezm Pilaff (the regional rice-and-lamb dish with the kitchen's signature longer-grain rice variety, $7); Manty (the steamed lamb-and-onion dumplings, $5 for six pieces); Zeravshan (the speciality dish of meat stuffed in egg batter and fried, named after the Zeravshan River, $8). A meal of three Khorezmian classics for two runs $20-30.
The room is the architectural set-piece. The Allakuli Khan Madrasah's central courtyard has been preserved as the primary dining area — open-air with traditional Uzbek-style low cushion-and-floor-rug seating, with the madrasah's mud-brick walls and the carved-wood entrance pavilion visible from the dining tables. The adjacent ground-floor cells (originally the madrasah's student-and-teacher rooms) have been converted into private dining booths for groups of four to eight. Capacity is forty across the building.
What makes Khorezm Art the right Khiva dinner choice is the architectural authenticity — the restaurant is genuinely operating inside a working royal-school building, and the Uzbek-traditional decoration and the regional Khorezmian menu give the dinner cultural depth that no other Khiva restaurant can match. Walk-ins always work outside Uzbek-tourist peak weeks.
Best Occasion Fit
First dates with travel-curious partners — the madrasah-courtyard setting is genuinely one of Central Asia's most romantic dinner backdrops. Birthdays — the multi-course Khorezmian-classics format is properly celebratory, and the staff will arrange a small song with notice. Team dinners with visiting colleagues — the courtyard format absorbs eight to twelve and the architectural setting gives the meal a built-in cultural anchor.
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