The Restaurant
Uzbegim sits at the back of a refurbished pizzeria on 28th Avenue North in Nashville's West End - a short drive from Vanderbilt and the Music Row commercial corridor. Owner Ulugbek Fayziev opened the restaurant in late 2023 in a shared space behind another Uzbek-owned pizza counter, with seating across a small interior dining room and a stunning back patio that is one of the most quietly memorable outdoor dining rooms in the city. The Michelin Guide named Uzbegim to its Bib Gourmand list in the 2026 inaugural American South selection, the recognition for restaurants offering excellent food at moderate prices.
The kitchen specialises in authentic Uzbek cuisine, the Central Asian tradition that travelled from Islamic China across the Silk Road to the Middle East. The menu runs lamb samosa (samsa) baked in a tandoor with a crisp, blistered shell and juicy lamb-and-onion filling; lamb kebab grilled over coals; plov - the national rice dish - built with carrot, cumin, lamb and chickpeas; lagman, the hand-pulled noodle stir-fry with beef and vegetables and a fried egg on top; and manti, the steamed lamb dumplings served with yogurt. Portions are generous and the spicing is fragrant rather than aggressive - coriander, cumin, dill - built for a long, sharing-style meal rather than a quick lunch.
Pricing remains genuinely Bib Gourmand - most mains are $18-24 and the table can be fed seriously well for $35 a head. The shared dining space at the front of the pizzeria is more casual; the patio at the back, when open in shoulder seasons, is the room to ask for. Service is small-team and warm, and the menu is built for the kind of slow, dish-passing meal that anchors a real evening rather than a quick stop. For a Nashville dinner that does not lean into hot chicken or steakhouse cliche, this is the most quietly distinctive table the city has produced in the past two years.
Why This Is Nashville’s Team Dinner Pick
For a team dinner in Nashville, Uzbegim solves the size-and-character problem at once. The shared-plate Uzbek format encourages a sharing meal of eight to twelve without anyone choosing for the group. The Bib Gourmand recognition keeps the per-head spend under control while still anchoring the dinner to a Michelin-recognised address. The 28th Avenue North patio handles longer dwell times comfortably. And the menu's Central Asian distance from typical Nashville hot-chicken-and-meat-and-three options gives the dinner a real talking point - exactly the kind of room a team remembers six months later, in a way that another generic steakhouse never quite is.
Leave a Review
Registered members get published by default; guest reviews are moderated first.