Falls Church lost a popular pizzeria on S. Maple Avenue in the spring of 2024, and the Falls Church News-Press called the closing "a sudden, unhappy development." On June 20, publisher Nicholas F. Benton had better news for the Little City: the space would become the third Dolan Uyghur Restaurant.
"The Dolan Uyghur will not be just any restaurant," he wrote. For Hamid Kerim, the owner, "it will mark another important step in his unfolding restaurant empire here that foresees more locations in the wider area where he already has restaurants on Connecticut Avenue in Northwest D.C. and in Chantilly to the west."
Benton used the announcement to introduce his readers to the Uyghur people — Turkic, living primarily in northwestern China, subject to a government crackdown since 2017, with a small community of about 10,000 in the United States centered in Fairfax County — and to the man bringing their food to Falls Church. Hamid, he noted, is himself a refugee from that crackdown, with two brothers and a sister-in-law in jail. "It will represent a way for residents here to join the fight for democracy and freedom against the tyranny of autocracy and repression," Benton wrote, "merely by dining."
He also explained our name: "The word, Dolan, in the name of the restaurant is the name of an ancient tribe of Uyghur people who lived in the Taklamakan Desert. While there are modern Dolan people, the term 'Dolan' primarily refers to an earlier Uyghur culture and civilization in the region." And he described the cooking as "a blend of Central Asian and more traditionally Chinese preparations with lots of lentils, noodles, fried rice, chicken and lamb prepared as soups, stews and kabobs."
The News-Press placed Dolan alongside the Little City's growing roster of acclaimed dining rooms and predicted we would "soon join that roster." The paper expected an opening by the end of summer; the build-out of our largest restaurant — 154 seats, a 42-seat patio and a bar — took a little longer, and Dolan Falls Church opened on November 11, 2024.
A year later, in a July 2025 column about the neighborhood around S. Washington and Maple, the same paper described us as "the formidable Dolan Uyghur restaurant" and credited the city's Economic Development Authority and civic leaders with helping bring a Dolan to Falls Church. We are glad they did.
This article is our own account of the coverage; short quotations are attributed to Falls Church News-Press, which holds the copyright to the original piece.