How Grandma’s Secret, Broward’s only Uzbekistan restaurant, came to Dania Beach
Broward County’s only Uzbekistan restaurant, Grandma’s Secret, has opened on Dania Beach Boulevard with a tantalizing name and belly-warming cuisine spanning several Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries.
Why several? The answer, if you ask owner Bakhtiyor Ostonov, is rooted in Uzbek history. Its mashup of cuisine — flame-grilled kebabs, spiced shawarma, steamed dumplings, lagman soup — was formed by 70 years of Soviet occupation, forced resettlements and the cross-pollination of Muslim cultures under that rule.
Which is why his 1,000-square-foot kitchen, which debuted in late October, marries Uzbek cuisine with dishes from Kazakhstan, Armenia, Turkey and Xinjiang in northwestern China, home to the Uyghur ethnic group.
“We are all one big melting pot,” says Ostonov, who also speaks fluent Russian, Spanish and Uzbek. “We are Muslim and we are Turk, but we understand each other because we’re ex-Soviet Union.”
After his father died of COVID-19 two years ago, Ostonov, who worked in a glass bottling plant in Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital, says he applied for and won a green card in a lottery. Eight months ago he moved his wife, Kristina, and two children to Sunny Isles Beach.
He wanted to live close to South Florida’s Russian-speaking community, and when he arrived neighbors shared “alarming” details about American eating habits.
“In my country, we cook all the time. So I spoke to neighbors and asked if they prepare food at home and they go, ‘No! We go to McDonald’s,’ ” Ostonov says. “And my wife says that means I should open a restaurant.”
Even with its significant Russian population, South Florida has a scarcity of Uzbek food. (Chayhana Oasis, in Sunny Isles Beach, is the only other Uzbek eatery in the tri-county area.) And Russians form the bulk of his customer base, he adds. Two weeks ago, he temporarily closed to replace the storefront’s new glass windows, and took a break from yelling at the window people by resting under a tree in the parking lot.
Of course, his relaxation was short-lived. A Sunny Isles Beach man in a Cadillac slinked by the squat building and asked in Russian why the restaurant was closed. They chatted animatedly.
“He wanted to tell me how eager he was to come inside,” Ostonov said after the Cadillac drove off. “He can’t find food like this anywhere.”
With its low-slung profile, Grandma’s Secret represents a Dania Beach in transition. The boxy, burgundy-colored storefront fills the bones of an old Philly dive (Pat’s Cheese Steak Hoagies & Pizza operated here for decades), and is dwarfed a pair of luxury apartment towers. (“Lots of Russian speakers live in the high-rises,” he says.)
Inside, the 14-seat dining room is filled with piped-in Uzbek music, photos of Uzbekistan’s landscape, displays of decorative dinner plates and a dutar, an Uzbek guitar. The room is perfumed with roasted peppers, fried eggplant and raw garlic.
So what’s the secret in Grandma’s Secret? Ostonov’s late grandmother, Djamilya Ostonova, crafted many of the Uzbek recipes, he says, although the dishes aren’t executed by him but rather a professional chef named Abubakir Javokhir. A meal typically begins with obi non ($2.99 for small, $4.99 for large), discs of Uzbek sourdough flatbread that are thicker than Indian naan and resemble a nautilus shell. There are also samsas ($5.99), empanada-style puff pastries filled with beef or diced pumpkin.
By far, the restaurant’s signature dish is tashkent pilaf ($17.99), slivers of lamb and beef atop a bed of long-grain rice, grated carrots, onions, nuts and boiled quail eggs. There is also Uyghur lagman ($13.99), a hot soup of housemade noodles, lamb, cracked pepper, roasted tomatoes, green long beans and diced celery.
Other dishes include the Dania Set ($20.99-$39.99), a kind of Turkish breakfast plate stuffed with sunny-side-up quail eggs, crepe-style pancakes, honey, chocolate, cherry jam, apples and apricots. And there are kebabs ($14.99-$24.99) made with lamb chops, shrimp, salmon, branzino, beef or liver; and manti ($14.99), steamed flour dumplings formed by hand and filled with lamb, beef and diced pumpkin.
He says that some customers — OK, non-Russians — can be intimidated by Uzbek food. “I usually say it’s Mediterranean,” Ostonov says. “If I tell them Central Asian, they don’t know. They say, ‘Chinese?’ and I say, ‘No.’ So I let them try our cheeses and they look at our menu pictures and I tell them what’s in everything.”
Grandma’s Secret, at 50 E. Dania Beach Blvd., in Dania Beach, is open 2-10 p.m. Mondays an 8 a.m.-10 p.m. Tuesday-Sundays. Call 954-639-7038.
