Dolan's story begins on September 10, 2018, the day Hamid Kerim opened the doors at 3518 Connecticut Avenue NW as its owner. But the dining room has a prologue. The restaurant had opened under another Uyghur family in late 2016, and in January 2017 The Washington Post's restaurant critic, Tom Sietsema, reviewed it and rated it "Good" — two stars on the Post's scale. It was the first time most Washingtonians had read the word "Uyghur" on a dining page, and the review set out, patiently, to explain what the kitchen was doing.
Sietsema opened with a request from the dining room: do not call this Chinese food. The people behind the cooking come from a region in northwestern China, he explained, but they speak their own Turkic language and, being Muslim, follow their own customs — and their food follows suit. "Cumin, chilies and charred meat greet your nose," he wrote of the kebabs coming off the grill, a cuisine shaped by the borders its homeland shares with Afghanistan, India, Mongolia and Russia.
The dishes he singled out are still the ones guests ask for today. The chuchure soup — "a big bowl of clear broth, hinting of beef and strewn with cilantro, with delicate tortellini bobbing on it" — remains on every Dolan menu. He liked the lentil soup. And he had fun with goshnan, our pan-fried Uyghur meat pie, which he described as "Hamburger Helper in a crisp golden sleeve": filling, familiar and unlike anything else in Cleveland Park.
Before Dolan. This review predates the Dolan you know. The Cleveland Park restaurant was founded by another Uyghur family in late 2016. In 2018 that family decided to sell; Hamid Kerim bought the restaurant, spent three months learning the cooking from the previous owner, restructured the business and reopened it under his ownership on September 10, 2018 — the date we count as Dolan's beginning. From that dining room he built the group that now stretches from Washington to Chantilly, Falls Church, Rockville and Arlington. We keep this first review on our site as the prologue to that story: the address, the dining room and many of the recipes are the same, and it marks the moment Washington first tasted Uyghur food on Connecticut Avenue.
Nearly a decade later, the chuchure still arrives in a big bowl, the goshnan still comes out crisp, and the first-time guest still asks the same question Sietsema answered in his opening line. We are glad to keep answering it.
This article is our own account of the coverage; short quotations are attributed to The Washington Post, which holds the copyright to the original piece.
