Dolan makes Washingtonian's Cheap Eats list, three weeks after a new beginning

On September 10, 2018, Hamid Kerim opened Dolan's doors as its new owner. He had spent the previous three months in the kitchen with the restaurant's founder, learning the dishes one by one, and he did not yet speak much English. Three weeks later, Washingtonian magazine published its annual Cheap Eats guide — the list of places where the city's food editors eat well for little — and Dolan Uyghur was on it.

The entry, written by Washingtonian's food team of Ann Limpert, Anna Spiegel, Jessica Sidman and Cynthia Hacinli, was aimed at newcomers. "If you're new to Uyghur food, order up some 'big plate chicken,' one of the star dishes here," they wrote, describing "an immense platter of chewy, hand-pulled noodles topped with warmly spiced gravy and hunks of bone-in chicken, potato, and peppers" — "a fusion of Chinese and Middle Eastern influences."

The advice that followed is the advice our servers still give: "Bring a sizable group — this dish is the first of many worth exploring." The editors' other picks were the samsa, our oven-baked minced-beef pastries; the cumin lamb kebabs; manta, the steamed dumplings; and laghman, hand-pulled noodles with beef and vegetables.

For a restaurant in the middle of a change of hands, the timing mattered. Cheap Eats sent a steady stream of first-time guests up Connecticut Avenue that autumn, and many of them became the Cleveland Park regulars who carried Dolan through the years that followed. Hamid greeted most of those tables through an interpreter at first; over the following year he learned enough English to tell his own story.

The big plate chicken — listed on our menus as Hot Chicken Stew, and known at home as dapanji — is still the dish we point to when someone asks where to begin. It arrives on a platter meant for the middle of the table, the noodles underneath soaking up a gravy of tomato, pepper and spice, and it is still, as the editors put it, the first of many.