Naryn Noodles with Boiled Meat 纳仁
Naryn Noodles with Boiled Meat is featured among the local specialties of Xinjiang.
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Naryn Noodles with Boiled Meat (纳仁) is a dish of noodles or flat noodle pieces cooked in meat broth and served under chunks of boiled meat and onion. Ili Daily (伊犁日报) lists it among the most representative foods of the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture (伊犁哈萨克自治州), and the same dish is eaten across Central Asia, where it is also called beshbarmak.
How it is made
In Ili the meat is usually horse or beef, and Ili Daily singles out the horse-meat version as the most characteristic. The meat is boiled first, and the noodles or noodle pieces are then cooked in the same broth. They are lifted out onto a platter, the boiled meat is laid on top in pieces, and onion goes over the dish. Ili Daily describes the result as savoury and full of aroma.
In the wider Central Asian form of the dish, the noodle dough is made from flour, water, eggs and salt, rested, rolled out very thin and cut. The meat boiled first may be a rump of horse, a rack of lamb or horsemeat sausage, and in warm seasons mutton is the usual choice.
How it is eaten
Naryn is served on a large platter shared by several people. Its other name, beshbarmak, means 'five fingers' in Turkic languages, after the old habit of eating it with the hands. In Xinyuan County (新源县) in the Ili valley, which China News Service describes as the county with the largest Kazakh population in China, naryn is known as 'the first dish for guests' (待客第一道).
Where it comes from
Its Kazakh name is naryn (нарын), and the dish belongs to the meat-and-noodle cooking of Central Asia's herding peoples. On 15 April 2026 the Xinjiang Catering Association named naryn among Xinjiang's ten classic staple dishes (新疆十大经典名饭), a list the Ili prefecture government republished in its 'Eating in Ili' (吃在伊犁) section.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.