How Dolan kept its doors open through 2020 — as told to Heated

In the autumn of 2020, the food writer Mayukh Sen was traveling the country — by phone, mostly — asking immigrant restaurant owners how they were surviving. His column, In Transit, ran on Heated, and its second installment was about Dolan.

The piece began where Hamid Kerim's American story begins: his last night in Ürümqi in April 2017, with no time to say goodbye to friends, relatives or his own mother. "All he could do was buy a plane ticket and leave," Sen wrote. Hamid — identified in the article by his Uyghur name, Abduhemit Abdukeyum, and speaking through our manager Sabit Jelil as translator — described the first 18 months in the United States as the hardest of his life. In 2018 he heard that the founders of Dolan Uyghur in Cleveland Park wanted to sell. He had run businesses at home; he saw the restaurant as a way to tell Washington about his people. He took over in September 2018 and kept some of the existing staff.

Then came March 2020. Hamid told Sen those early weeks were "so scary" — personal expenses, the mortgage, the question of whether the business would survive at all. Dolan did not close. We cooked for carryout and delivery, and business fell to about a quarter of what it had been. "We had difficulty to support the rent with that income," Hamid said. A Paycheck Protection Program loan arrived in May. "After I received that help, I began to feel more confident for the future."

The city allowed patios in late May and half-capacity dining rooms in June; by July, our sidewalk tables and upstairs room were open again. What carried us, Hamid said, was the neighborhood. "We get a lot of support from neighbors in the Cleveland Park area." Most of those neighbors are not Uyghur, and Sen noted their particular fondness for two dishes: goshnan, the flat, round pie stuffed with meat and onions, and Piter Manta, our steamed buns of spiced beef and onion.

Sen also described the menu for readers who had never seen it — hand-pulled laghman dressed in sesame oil and garlic, spiced lamb kebabs on skewers, samsa capped with sesame, naan "fresh with the scent of butter." Reading it now, it is a portrait of a small restaurant with six full-time employees deciding not to give up. Six years and four more dining rooms later, that decision looks like the most important one we ever made.