On Tuesday, April 18, 2023, at 6:00 PM, we welcomed the Yelp Elite Squad to our original restaurant at 3518 Connecticut Avenue NW. The dinner was hosted with Sydney Gallimore, Community Manager for Yelp DC, and the guests were Yelp Elite members and local food reviewers — people who eat out for a living and had, in many cases, never tried Uyghur food.
We set the table the way a Uyghur family would: everything in the middle, everything shared. The menu was our greatest hits.
- Samsa and Kawa Samsa — oven-baked pastries, one filled with minced beef, lamb and onion, the vegetarian version with butternut squash.
- Korma Chop — our signature hand-pulled noodles, stir-fried with peppers, onions and spice.
- Big Plate Chicken (Hot Chicken Stew) — bone-in chicken braised with potatoes and peppers over wide noodles, the platter meant for the whole table.
- Fried Green Bean, Fried Rice and Spicy Sour Tofu, with White Rice alongside.
- Baklava to finish, and pots of Dolan Gul Chai, our caffeine-free floral tea, poured all evening.
Hamid Kerim moved between tables as he does every night, answering the question he has heard thousands of times — "What is Uyghur food?" — with a short history of the Silk Road and an invitation to try the noodles first.
Elite events matter to a small restaurant group. They put our food in front of the city's most active reviewers in a single evening, and they let us tell the whole story — the culture, the hospitality, the reason Dolan exists — rather than the two minutes a busy Friday allows. This first dinner led to a second one in Chantilly three months later, and the series has followed us to every new dining room since.
This article is our own account of the coverage; short quotations are attributed to Yelp Elite Events, which holds the copyright to the original piece.
