The Baguette’s Golden Hour
At the counter of this Karaganda-born project, sourdough loaves and croissants coexist quite happily with doughnuts and wafer rolls. Somewhere nearby sits a sausage baked in dough; the potato pirozhok shows no sign of feeling inferior beside its French neighbours. That is precisely what makes Hani Bakery interesting: a contemporary bakery need not displace the food of childhood. While the rest of the city is learning to pronounce pain au chocolat correctly, an almond-milk cappuccino may still arrive with an ordinary hot pirozhok. No harm, it turns out, comes to one’s reputation as a gastronome.
Few arguments divide the post-Soviet sweet tooth more reliably than medovik versus Napoléon. Melly’s has arrived at a disarmingly simple settlement: put both cakes in the same box. More than 1,500 of these two-cake assortments leave the bakery each month, which suggests that, at least in pastry, diplomacy has its uses. Melly’s began with macarons baked at home by its founder, Balzhan Bekbolat, and grew from there into a full-scale production. The name carries its own small etymology. Meli is Greek for honey; Balzhan is formed from the Kazakh bal, meaning honey, and zhan, meaning soul. The result is a honey-souled patisserie in the most literal sense. But reflection does not last long at the door. Butter announces itself before anything else, followed by display cases laden with oversized American cookies and the bakery’s square buns. The poppy-seed one is excellent. So is the cinnamon roll.
If the archives bear out its 1986 opening date, Lakomka predates not only the Astana we know today, but the city’s current name — and most of the places in this guide. Through successive renamings and shifts in the city’s appetite, it has kept turning out the same things: the eponymous custard-filled Lakomka, tartlets, bread and buns. There is one refrain that surfaces again and again in reviews: for years, the desserts have tasted exactly the same. That kind of constancy feels almost radical now, when menus bend to every pistachio craze, Dubai phenomenon and matcha fixation. Lakomka has another effect entirely: the sudden, unbidden return of a schoolday.
A Patisserie Born of the Macaron
Warning: this assignment has left the editorial team one jeans size larger.
Here, they are certain of one thing: a good baguette has a very short life expectancy. Paris Brest recommends eating it within an hour of leaving the oven, while the crust still crackles and the crumb remains tender. By evening, a proper baguette will inevitably begin to resemble a weapon for close combat — a quality regarded here as a virtue, not a flaw. The rest of the French baking is treated with the same lack of ceremony: it is made to be eaten now, not saved for some more deserving occasion. Croissants and bread are the main event. And if a baguette does survive a little longer, it is only as a sandwich with salmon, cream cheese, tomatoes and mozzarella.
Bordeaux can lay claim to Jacques-Yves Cousteau, some of the world’s great wines and one little pastry with a backstory far more tangled than its size suggests. The canelé is unmistakable: a near-black, caramelised crust giving way to a soft, almost custardy centre, fragrant with vanilla and rum. One legend traces its origins to the nuns of Bordeaux. Local winemakers, it is said, gave them the egg yolks left over after using the whites to clarify their wine. Historians remain unconvinced by the more romantic version. But with a dessert this striking, a little mythmaking only adds to its allure. Astana’s Canelé takes its name from the Bordeaux original, but the pastry case has plenty more to recommend it: pain au chocolat, a Swiss-style pastry filled with chocolate and walnuts, seasonal desserts and all manner of buns. After 8 p.m., the hunt for pastries begins in earnest: everything in the bakery case is 20 per cent off.
Honey Soul
Old Astana
The New-Generation Pirozhok
Emigration carries unexpected cargo. An old photograph album, perhaps. Christmas ornaments. Or a family recipe for a cake. The Ukrainian couple behind Stolitsa Bakery brought the latter to Astana — and led with it. Kyiv’s signature sweet souvenir has found a second home in the city. The celebrated Kyiv cake is composed of crisp hazelnut meringue layers and chocolate buttercream. Astana has embraced it so wholeheartedly that the bakery now sells around 50 cakes a day. Beside it sit Vechirniy Kyiv chocolates: the smaller relations of a legend, each a handmade truffle with a whole hazelnut in Belgian chocolate. The next arrival is Odesa aubergine caviar. Here, the aubergines are deliberately kept out of the blender: chopped rather than puréed, so that their smoky character remains intact, then mixed with fresh tomatoes and herbs. The result is spread over puff pastry and given a generous snowfall of ten-year-aged Parmesan — a culinary teleport to the country of pampushky and halushky, nothing less.
Home Macaron began, exactly as its name suggests, with homemade macarons. It has since grown into a full patisserie with its own bread bakery. Founder and pastry technologist Asel Shokhitbayeva has gradually carried the menu far beyond those brightly coloured, filled shells: croissants, palmiers and crisp puff pastries now share the counter. The tarte au sucre deserves particular attention. A northern French brioche with sour cream and a caramelised sugar crust, it is less showy than many contemporary desserts — and vanishes from the display with far greater speed. There is sourdough bread, too: rye and wholegrain loaves, tartine, ciabatta, and laminated baguettes with cheese or with herbs and garlic. In short, the bakery bakes the lot.
How Astana Fell for the Croissant
Time Machine
A Little Bordeaux
Astana’s appetite for croissants has a name: Dana Kanapina. The founder of La Crème began by baking for her children. La Crème followed, first as a pâtisserie; over time, a whole constellation of ventures grew around it. The croissant made a journey of its own, going from French novelty to a fixture of the capital’s breakfast table. At La Crème, croissants have long pulled double duty: a pastry in their own right and the flaky foundation for a line of savoury signatures. The Traditional pairs a meat filling with cheese mousse; the signature La Crème brings together trout, poached egg and spinach; the Versal comes with nut-crusted chicken; and the Monaco combines tuna and tomatoes. These days, a croissant in Astana barely raises an eyebrow. That may be the finest compliment to the bakers who got there first, long before the flaky French classic became a fixture on every other café menu.
Photos: author’s archive, restaurant websites and social media; Yandex Maps
If Hayao Miyazaki ever made an animated film about a café tucked into the back lanes of Eurasia 3, Kofedelnya could have stepped straight out of his storyboards. The scent of butter hangs in the air. Behind the glass, a planetary mixer kneads dough; nearby, caramel simmers and raspberry tea steeps in a mug. There’s no magic at work, of course — though the place has a way of making you wonder. Croissants, both sweet and savoury, share the display case with canelés, buns and tiramisu. Every stage of the baking happens in plain sight, lending the café the lived-in ease of a home kitchen.
English edition by Yevgeniya Yussupova
The Kyiv-Odessa-Astana Line
