Six months after we opened our second restaurant on Metrotech Drive, Northern Virginia Magazine sent a writer who knew exactly what she was eating. Alice Levitt had traveled through the Uyghur homeland — "from food courts to a tiny village in the brick-hued Flaming Mountains, at the edge of the Taklamakan desert" — and had, in her words, plowed through plates of polo with gusto. Her December 2021 column, "Sharing Xinjiang at Dolan Uyghur Restaurant in Chantilly," was about ours.
"The finest item that emerges from the kitchen at Dolan Uyghur Restaurant in Chantilly is the Uyghur polo," she wrote. The rice dish goes by many names across Central Asia — plov, pulao, and polow, as it appears on our menu — and it is as common in Uyghur restaurants as laghman. Levitt described how ours is made: short-grain rice "cooked in a meaty broth, imbuing every bite with a rich, glancingly sweet flavor." Not sticky rice, exactly, "though it does have a satisfying dose of glutinous adhesion" — rather "an al dente collection of grains that's spotted with tender chunks of meat (beef, in this case, though lamb is more typical), carrots, and raisins."
The raisins, she insisted, are the point. Turpan, two hours from Ürümqi, is China's largest producer of raisins, and Levitt wrote that Americans "can only dream of the diverse varieties produced there, each more sugary and nuanced than the last." The golden raisins in our polo, she said, "are a reminder of this sweet fact."
Her column placed the Chantilly restaurant in context: roughly 2,500 Uyghurs live in the Washington region, according to the Uyghur Human Rights Project, and Dolan was one of the newest of the area's Uyghur food businesses — the second restaurant from owner Hamid Kerim, after Cleveland Park. Because the Chinese government makes it hard for foreigners to spend time in the homeland, she concluded, there is "all the more reason to fall in love with the aromatic cuisine here at home."
We serve polo at every Dolan today, with beef or lamb shank and a vegetarian version, and the Chantilly kitchen still makes it the way Levitt tasted it in 2021. If you have never had Uyghur rice, this is where to start — and it is the dish we put at the center of the table for the Yelp Elite buffet in Chantilly two summers later.
This article is our own account of the coverage; short quotations are attributed to Northern Virginia Magazine, which holds the copyright to the original piece.
