There are not many restaurants in North Dallas where you can order pilaf with tender slow-cooked beef and fragrant rice, follow it with lamb chops off the grill, and then find yourself dancing with strangers to live music before the evening ends. Bubala Cafe & Grill at 17479 Preston Road is one of them, and it has been doing this quietly in a Preston Road strip center long enough that the people who know about it consider it theirs.
The kitchen draws from Uzbek and Eastern European traditions — food from the old Soviet republics, from the Caucasus, from the style of home cooking that shows up at family tables in Tashkent and Tbilisi and Moscow without being simplified for a Western audience. Sima Bell runs the family restaurant with her Sister Marina Denisov and husband Bernard Bell.
Let’s talk food. The samsa, baked pastries stuffed with chopped lamb, onion, and spice, come two to an order and taste like something a grandmother made rather than something a kitchen assembled. The pelmeny are handmade dumplings filled with beef, served with sour cream, and the khinkali — Georgian soup dumplings filled with beef, herbs, and spice — are the order for anyone who wants to understand what Central Asian dumpling culture actually feels like when someone makes it properly. You eat them by pinching the top and biting through the dough while the broth is still inside.
The Adjarian khachapuri — a boat-shaped dough filled with melted cheese, cracked egg, and butter — is the dish that lands first and sets the table’s mood. It is messy and rich and impossible to stop eating.
Soups run deep. Lagman — handmade noodles, vegetables, and chopped beef in a rich broth — is the most distinctly Uzbek thing on the menu and the order for cold nights or long afternoons. Kharcho, a Georgian beef soup with herbs and spices, is the darker and more complex alternative. Borscht, the traditional beet and cabbage soup, runs vegetarian here. All three are the kind of soup that reminds you why soup mattered before anyone decided it was a starter course
The kebab program is serious. The lula kebab — finely ground lamb or beef mixed with spices and shaped around long skewers — is the Central Asian street food standard done with conviction. The Bubala kebab is the house original: layers of sliced beef, fat, and ground meat stacked and grilled together in a way that produces something more complex than any single cut could. The lamb chops, marinated and grilled until charred and still pink inside, are the order for the table that wants the full picture. An eight-skewer platter for the whole table runs $83.99 and handles the decision problem cleanly.
Main dishes cover beef stroganoff with tender strips of beef in creamy mushroom sauce over buttery noodles, chicken Kiev with the butter still sealed inside, stuffed cabbage rolls with ground beef and rice, and oven-roasted salmon finished in a butter and caviar sauce. The Tashkent salad — green radish and beef tongue with fried onions and mayo — is the cold appetizer that tells you immediately whether this kitchen is paying attention. It is. For dessert, the honey cake (medovik), built from multiple thin layers of honey-soaked pastry and cream, is the kind of dessert that a table shares and then finishes entirely.
Podshuba
Bubala is BYOB, which is either news or a reason to plan ahead depending on how you approach a Saturday night. The room has white tablecloths, candles, and the energy of a place that treats dinner as an occasion rather than a transaction. On Fridays and Saturdays the live music starts at 8 p.m. — belly dancing, DJ sets, and a dance floor that fills up over the course of the evening with guests from across the former Soviet Union and their Dallas-born friends who found this place and kept coming back
Lina sometimes sings each week.” The $35 minimum per person applies on weekend nights. It is not hard to spend.
Open Tuesday through Thursday noon to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday noon to 10 p.m., Sunday noon to 9 p.m. Closed Monday. Reservations on OpenTable. (469) 466-8818.
