ShareAmerica is the U.S. Department of State's public storytelling platform, and in December 2020 it turned its attention to an unlikely form of diplomacy: a Uyghur restaurant in Cleveland Park. The article, "Uyghur restaurateurs serve culinary diplomacy," made a point of noting that Dolan Uyghur Restaurant in Washington is not affiliated with a similarly named restaurant on the West Coast. The Dolan it profiled was ours.
The piece explained the cuisine for a national audience — "a combination of influences from India, the Middle East, Turkey, Central Asia, China and more" — with lamb kebabs "fired on an open grill and sprinkled with cumin and other spices" and laghman, "fresh, hand-pulled noodles served up with vegetables and a spicy sauce." Its photographs showed those kebabs on our table, and Hamid Kerim standing outside the restaurant with chef Mohamad Tauhid, who ran our kitchen.
Hamid, speaking through an interpreter, described how the food opens the door. "Customers comment on the fresh ingredients and ask where the cuisine comes from," he said. "I try to give some news, a brief introduction if the customer has time and the patience to hear."
ShareAmerica also set down the facts of Hamid's journey as he told them: he moved his wife and two children to the United States in 2016 while continuing to run an international trade business at home; he returned to Ürümqi in 2017 to manage it and fled a few months later after learning his name was on a list of people to be imprisoned. He left without being able to tell his mother goodbye, and later learned the government had taken all fifteen branches of his company. In 2018 he started over, buying this restaurant from its prior owners, also Uyghurs.
"I'm the luckiest one to be in the United States and to have the chance to live in a free country," he said.
The original article has since left the State Department's site, but it survives in the Internet Archive, and its photographs — U.S. government works — remain among the few professional pictures of Dolan's early years. We think of the piece the way Hamid thinks of every table he visits: as an introduction. Kebabs first, then the news, if you have the time and the patience to hear.
This article is our own account of the coverage; short quotations are attributed to ShareAmerica (U.S. Department of State), which holds the copyright to the original piece.
