Meet the Kyrgyzstani Chef Plating her Overlooked Cuisine on the Peninsula

There’s a singularity to the menu at Nursel, a small restaurant in downtown San Carlos. Many of the dishes are distinctly Eastern European, such as the borscht, a hearty ruby-pink soup made with beef, cabbage and potatoes, and the vareniki, dense dumplings filled with mashed potatoes and onions usually served with butter.

Meet the Kyrgyzstani Chef Plating her Overlooked Cuisine on the Peninsula

Nursel is a tiny, unassuming restaurant in San Carlos. It’s also a hot spot for Central Asian and Russian diasporic dishes.

But then there are Asian-inspired meals visible on the menu. Take the ganfan, s teamed white rice with marinated beef, bell peppers, and tomatoes, or the lagman, a dish of hand-pulled noodles simmered in a similarly saucy and spicy medley.

Owner Nursel Koigeldieva blends these two different fares without hesitation. That’s because the 36-year-old cook is from Kyrgyzstan, a small landlocked country in Central Asia that embraces both Kyrgyz and Russian cultures. For Koigeldieva, running one of the Bay Area’s only Kyrgyz restaurants isn’t just a job: it’s a way to share her heritage with locals.

“Here, I feel like I’m home,” Koigeldieva says of her Old Country Road restaurant.

Nursel Central Asian and Russian Cuisine opened in 2021, across from the downtown San Carlos Caltrain Station. Anyone can come in and eat a meal at the restaurant, order from the display case filled with sweet and savvy Kyrgyz pastries, or request catering services. Nursel also operates a ghost kitchen along 1200 Market Street in San Francisco for those who can’t make it to the flagship location.

Koigeldieva prides herself on being able to offer locals a taste of authentic Kyrgyz meals she grew up eating. She goes back and forth between the San Carlos and San Francisco kitchens, making sure each dish is cooked just right.

“I don’t have a special chef from Kyrgyzstan making it,” she says. “I’m the chef, and I created the menu from the beginning. Everyday, it’s the same taste as from the beginning.”

The Bay Area has only a handful of eateries specializing in Central Asian cuisine. There’s Sofiya in San Francisco that serves traditional Uzbek foods and Kusan Uyghur Cuisine which has storefronts in San Jose, Milpitas and Mountain View. When it comes to Kyrgyz food, however, the scene is even more sparse. Nursel is one of the few selling popular meals like that ganfan and kuurdak, which is a plate of fried lamb and potatoes. It’s unknown how many people in the Bay Area belong to the Kyrgyz community – the nine-counties in the region don’t track the demographic data – but Koigeldieva says the number is small.

Kyrgyzstan is roughly half the size as California and has a population of around seven million people. It was in Koigeldieva’s hometown of Cholpon Ata, a tourist town on the northern shore of the nation’s famous lake Issyk-Kul, where she discovered her love of cooking. She grew up taking care of her family’s farm alongside her siblings, often tending to their animals and gardens. Her culinary journey started when she was five years old and just barely tall enough to reach the stove. Soon, she was in charge of cooking for the whole family.

“I didn’t like when my mom was making (food) for everyone,” she says with a laugh. “I wanted something special, so I cooked for myself. Later, I was in charge of cooking for the whole family.”

Koigeldieva moved to the country’s capital Bishkek to attend university. She thought she would eventually return back to Cholpon Ata after graduating, but her love life had other plans. Her boyfriend had left Kyrgyzstan to work in the U.S. At 22, she made the journey halfway around the world to join him. They ended up in Los Angeles, and were soon married with children. While her husband worked Koigeldieva stayed at home, but she wondered if there were opportunities to return to her first love: cooking.

It wasn’t until the family settled in the Bay Area that Koigeldieva decided to debut her cooking skills by starting a small catering service for her Kyrgyz friends. Encouraged by the enthusiastic response, she agreed to sell meals out of a food stall at the Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco. The stall shut down when the mall temporarily closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. By that time, a more confident Koigeldieva felt ready to take a risk and launch Nursel.

There’s another reason why owning the restaurant means a lot to Koigeldieva: it’s a way for her to defy her home country’s gender norms. In Kyrgyzstan, the country faces high rates of gender inequality. Women are underrepresented in leadership roles, face a gender pay gap and continue to hold an unequal share of unpaid domestic and care work, according to UN Women.

“In Kyrgyzstan, they never said, ‘You’re making something special, or you can do it,” she says. “Because I’m a woman, there is a difference.”

Koigeldieva says there are times when she struggles to deal with sexism in the restaurant business, day-to-day business operations and taking care of her three young children as a now single mom. But at the end of the day, Koigeldieva says the restaurant is a reminder of what she is capable of achieving, and cooking for others makes her happy.

“When I cook, all that I have going on in my life is gone,” she says. “I’m just thinking about food, how they will eat. All my love, I give it there in the process. It makes me calm.”