Hazara has been quietly serving Mongolia's serious North Indian cooking since 2009, founded by an Indian chef who moved to Ulaanbaatar during the mining-investment wave of the late 2000s and stayed. The restaurant occupies a two-level space on Peace Avenue near the Bayangol Hotel, styled with the warm-wood-and-brass register of a Delhi fine-dining room transported north. What matters is not the décor but the kitchen, which is the only one in Mongolia that runs a proper tandoor at tandoor temperatures.
The menu is North Indian in the technical sense — Punjabi tandoor, Mughlai slow-cooked, Awadhi rice, Kashmiri spice blends. The butter chicken is made the serious way, with the chicken marinated overnight in yogurt and tandoori spices then finished in a cashew-tomato gravy that has reduced for three hours. The dal makhani runs the 24-hour cook-time the dish actually requires. The rogan josh uses a Kashmiri chilli paste whose Scoville register is calibrated downward for the Mongolian palate without losing its character.
The vegetarian menu is Hazara's quiet importance. Mongolia is a heavy-meat-culture country, and the city's vegetarian visitors (a growing cohort of mining-industry professionals from the UK, Australia, and India) eat at Hazara because there are not many alternatives. The kitchen makes its own paneer daily; the saag paneer and the paneer tikka are both dishes the chef has refined over fifteen years; the dosa station (South Indian, added in 2017) runs weekends and Sunday brunch.
Service is Indian-hospitality-register warm, managed by the founder's son who has worked at the restaurant since he was a teenager. The English is fluent and the menu briefing on arrival is thorough. The main downside is that Hazara is consistently busy and the dining-room acoustics can become demanding at full capacity — the booth tables along the east wall are the correct request for a two-top who want to hear each other. The weekend thali — a twelve-bowl sampler menu — is one of the best-value deals in the city.
Best for First Date
Hazara is Ulaanbaatar's correct restaurant for visitors who are travelled enough to be sceptical of standard-issue Asian fusion and want the proper thing. For a first date with a vegetarian partner, it is the default booking in the city. For a team dinner where the group wants a break from mutton, the thali-style family-service ordering works well for groups of six to twelve. For solo dining, the long counter runs a single-diner set menu that is excellent value.