Food at Network School: included meals and the Astana alternative

What included meals means

Meals are part of the membership, three a day, alongside your room, the gym and coworking. The point is to remove a daily decision: you don't shop, cook or think about what to eat, and the food is designed to support your training.

The house style leans hard toward health optimisation: clean, macro-conscious, plant-forward and deliberately repetitive. People who treat food as fuel find it close to ideal and end up eating better than they do at home without trying. People who treat food as one of life's pleasures get bored somewhere in week two.

Menus, preparation and how dietary requirements are handled at the Astana campus are things to ask about. If food matters a lot to you, ask before you pay.

Dietary requirements: ask first

Vegetarians are likely to be well looked after, since a menu built around optimisation tends to be plant-heavy anyway. Vegan is usually workable but tighter, so expect to supplement.

Ask about halal directly. Kazakhstan is a majority-Muslim country and halal food is easy to find in the city, but that tells you about Astana. The campus kitchen is a separate question.

Get allergies and medical diets confirmed in writing before you commit money. A community kitchen feeding a few hundred people on a macro plan isn't automatically set up for a serious allergy, and "we'll see what we can do" is not the answer you want after paying for a month and flying six thousand kilometres.

Bring a supply of anything you depend on for the first week, while you work out how the food actually works.

The city is your escape valve

This is where a capital beats an isolated campus. When you tire of optimised meals, and most people do now and then, Astana has a good, varied restaurant scene: Kazakh and Central Asian food, Georgian, Turkish, Korean, Japanese and Italian, plus a strong cafe culture. Delivery apps work well and reach the whole city.

Local food deserves proper attention. Kazakh cuisine is heavy on meat and dairy and built for a continental climate. Try beshbarmak, plov, samsa, laghman and the local dairy while you're here. The Georgian restaurants are some of the best eating in the region.

There are supermarkets everywhere, so keeping your own snacks, coffee or supplements is easy. Budget something for eating out. It isn't covered by membership, and it's one of the more reliable ways to have a good evening.

Practical notes

Coffee is easy to find and generally good in central Astana.

Tap water is normally treated as safe in the city, though many residents and visitors drink filtered or bottled water. Follow what people around you do.

Alcohol is legal and easy to buy, and with the community's health-first culture, drinking is common without being central. Nobody will push you either way.

Eating on a training schedule works better here than in most places, because the food is designed for it. If your goal for the month includes physical progress, the meal plan helps. The boredom is the price of not having to think about it.