Washingtonian's Eat Great Cheap feature is the magazine's annual answer to a simple question: where in Washington can you eat very well for $25 or less a person? In August 2019, for the second year in a row, the answer included Dolan Uyghur in Cleveland Park.
The editors led with the dish that has anchored our menu since the beginning. "Noodles are likely what will get you hooked on Uyghur cuisine, a crossroads of Middle Eastern and Chinese flavors from China's Muslim minority," they wrote. "Chewy hand-pulled laghman noodles with stir-fried beef and vegetables are the signature attraction at this Cleveland Park dining room."
From there the write-up moved to the wider ribbons of noodle under our big plate chicken, "smothered in a spiced gravy with potatoes and peppers," and on to what the editors called the menu's "other doughy delights": dumplings filled with pumpkin — our Kawa Manta — and "a Uyghur-style pizza stuffed with ground beef," which is how many first-time guests describe goshnan.
Two mentions in two years meant something particular to us. The 2018 listing arrived weeks after Hamid Kerim took over the restaurant; the 2019 listing arrived after a year in which he had learned the cooking, the language and the neighborhood, hired a kitchen of immigrants from around the world and taught them the dishes he had just learned himself. The food Washingtonian praised in 2019 was, for the first time, entirely the work of Hamid's own team.
Laghman remains the dish we recommend to anyone who has never eaten Uyghur food. The dough is pulled by hand in our kitchen every day, which is why the noodles have the chew the editors noticed, and it is served several ways — stir-fried as Korma Chop, sauced as Dolan Laghman, with tofu for vegetarians. Start there, and the rest of the menu follows.
This article is our own account of the coverage; short quotations are attributed to Washingtonian, which holds the copyright to the original piece.
