Yurt: the Hong Kong restaurant putting Central Asian cuisine on the map
For the Kazakh founders of Yurt, opening the new Central Asian restaurant was written in the stars
In Ali Nuraly’s words, meeting fellow Kazakhs Xeniya Tregubenko and Marat Zakaryayev in Hong Kong, of all places, was his “destiny”.
Each had vastly different reasons for moving to Hong Kong: Tregubenko came for university and stayed to work in marketing; while recent arrival Nuraly originally came to find new leads for his family’s agriculture business.
Having met through connections, both were introduced to Kazakhstan-based chef Zakaryayev through a mutual friend. On their first call, Zakaryayev thought the idea of opening a Central Asian restaurant “was a prank or, at the very least, a distant, insane dream”. But eventually, he developed “a sense of responsibility to represent Central Asia” and got on board. Previously, he spearheaded kitchens in the Kazakh capital of Almaty and across various brands of the White Rabbit Family in Moscow, Russia.
Yurt is a particularly personal project for Tregubenko and Nuraly. “We had many conversations about how it would be nice to represent our cultures through a restaurant,” says Nuraly. “Central Asians here miss the tastes of home, so we decided to open Yurt to represent our culture and introduce it to Hong Kong diners.”