Merci is the Samarkand restaurant that acknowledges the city is 2026, not 1420. The design — blue painted walls, bright pink banquette seating, brass fittings, jazz on a Tuesday evening — reads closer to Istanbul or Tbilisi than to the rest of Samarkand, and that is the entire point. Young Samarkandis book Merci for date nights and birthdays precisely because it does not look like anywhere else in the city.
The menu is international in the honest sense — the kitchen works in several cuisines and delivers on each, rather than the 'world-food' register where everything tastes vaguely the same. The sushi bar turns out the city's most accurate nigiri and a set of rolls calibrated for Uzbek palates (the fish is flown in, which is why the prices are higher than the menu might suggest). The steak side of the menu runs through a short grill list — ribeye, tenderloin, a Tomahawk for two — finished with compound butter and a pepper reduction that most Central Asian steakhouses never get around to making properly.
The bar programme is the second reason Merci has become a local institution. The list runs to a full page of cocktails, with a handful of signatures built around Uzbek ingredients — a pomegranate-and-thyme spritz; a raki-style anise infusion with rock-sugar rim — alongside the international classics done to European standards. Staff have been trained by a travelling bar consultant who flies in twice a year, and it shows.
Merci is not trying to be a traditional Uzbek dining experience and should not be reviewed as one. It is the restaurant Samarkand needed — a confident, modern, design-literate room where the kitchen and the bar back each other up. The service register is friendly-professional in the Moscow sense, which is to say: fast, informed, and unperformative. For a solo diner on a business trip who wants a proper dinner rather than hotel room service, this is the correct choice.
Best for First Date
Merci is Samarkand's answer to a city date night that does not need a Registan-view backdrop. The design-driven room photographs well, the bar is set up for two-top intimacy, and the menu range means nobody has to order a dish they didn't want. For solo dining, the sushi counter is Samarkand's best single-diner seat, and the bar-side tables turn into a quick Wagyu burger and a Negroni without the ceremony of a full-menu evening.