My Love Affair With Uyghur Cuisine

A cuisine at the crossroads

Makarna Kavurması at Kardeşler Uygur Mutfağı (Ankara, Turkey): Photo taken by author

It’s a Saturday evening in 2015, and I’m trying to load up on calories before heading to a pub.

It’s a weeknight in 2018, and I’m meeting my fiancé for dinner.

It’s 2025, and I’m trying to convince my two-year-old to make it through a meal without throwing food and sugar packets on the floor.

I’m at Kardeşler Uyghur Restaurant, ordering twice as much food as I actually need to eat, watching eagerly as the full tables around me are brought a kaleidoscope of noodles, kebabs, salads, and dumplings.

This is the place that started it all. The place that made me sure I’d found the one. The one cuisine I would forever put above all others.

Uyghur cuisine is little known in the US. When I was a child, to my knowledge, there were no Uyghur restaurants in the greater Boston area, and I’d never seen the food or culture represented in the media. I’d probably never heard of the people or place until at least high school (and possibly college).

But in college, I began studying Turkish and was given an overview of the Turkic language families, which stretch west from Turkish-speaking communities in the Balkans, north to Yakutia in Siberia, and east to Xinjiang in Northwestern China, where Uyghur, a Turkic language, is spoken by roughly 15 million people.

I first encountered Uyghur cuisine at the long-closed Doğu Türkistan Kültür Vakfı (East Turkestan Culture Charitable Foundation), in Istanbul’s old city, in the summer of 2010. I recall the restaurant and center having no real menu. Just laghman.

This is a dish of long, hand-pulled noodles, served plain, alongside a bowl of savory beef (or lamb) vegetable stew. The contents of the two bowls are combined immediately before consumption. It made an impression.

A few years later, after moving to Ankara, I found that there were two Uyghur restaurants in the city. At that time, they were mostly visited by the city's immigrant populations and a few brave students. Systematically, I worked my way through their menus, excited by nearly everything I tried.

I must proceed with the caveat that I am far from an expert in Uyghur culture or cuisine, my knowledge largely confined to the menus designed to please the palate of Ankara’s Turkish and expat populations, and from the bits I’ve picked up from Kardeşler’s owners and waitstaff over the years.

But immediately, I understood that this food was different than anything I’d had before.

Or, maybe, that’s the wrong way to put it. Many of the dishes look familiar, but not in the context of a singular restaurant. A small plate of pan-fried dumplings, stuffed with ground beef and spinach, wouldn’t look out of place, at least visually, in Chinatown in any major city.

This is served alongside a small plate of large steamed dumplings, stuffed with onion, cumin, and ground meat, similar to Central Asian mantı, and steamed buns with meat, sweet peppers, and cumin.

Etli Ekmek, deep-fried flat bread stuffed with ground meat and onion, looks like Turkish börek, but tastes like meat-filled scallion pancakes. All of these starters are served with homemade chili sauce and black rice vinegar.

But this is just the dumplings. A myriad of vegetable dishes remind the diner alternatively of Chinese or Turkish side dishes. Spinach is blanched, then served with garlic and a simple dressing of sesame oil and rice vinegar. An Uyghur take on Turkish shepherd’s salad serves chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions in a spicy sesame sauce.

A series of vegetable stir-fries again recalls Chinese cooking techniques. Cabbage leaves are wok-fried in oil, garlic, and mouth-numbing Sichuan peppers. Eggplant and green beans are prepared in this manner as well, again, served with a healthy portion of garlic and Sichuan pepper.

Then there’s the kebabs, long and slender, packed with spice that would look at home anywhere from Uzbekistan to Greece.

Each one of these dishes is delicious in its own right, but recalls dishes familiar from other contexts, from Turkey or Greece, to China, to Russia, or anywhere in between.

And this is hardly surprising, given Xinjiang province’s geographic position.

The semi-autonomous region sits in the far Northwestern corner of the country and borders eight nations (Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, India, Pakistan, and Mongolia) and historically was a major stop on the Silk Road. It shows.

Go to an Uyghur restaurant, order one dish at random, and you’d be hard-pressed to guess its country of origin.

Ügre at Kardeşler Uygur Mutfağı (Ankara, Turkey): Photo taken by author

Yet, there is a coherence. The cabbage, the spinach salad, and the fried dumplings are all go-to orders for me. But they’re not the real reason I go. It’s the noodles and the soups.

What first caught my eye was the he ganbian soman, thick, roughly cut, chewy noodles pan-fried in a savory sauce with beef, green onions, and sweet bell peppers is the one to try for texture alone. The popularity of this dish is challenged, at least in Turkey, only by chuchure.

Small, tortellini-like meat-filled dumplings are in a meat broth, flavored heavily with mint, garlic, and ginger. But over time, I’ve come to love the ügre. This is a desceptively simple-looking noodle soup: paper-thin noodles, a few sliced green onions, and tender beef cuts in a clear broth.

The broth is alive with the flavor of sesame oil, garlic, and Sichuan pepper.

As a North American, Uyghur cuisine feels to me broadly recognizable as a cuisine of China. Yet, it doesn’t quite fit neatly into this box, at least as presented to me throughout my life in mainstream American Chinese restaurants.

Cooking traditions common to China (the noodles, say) sit comfortably alongside plates of kebabs and dumplings that, if you squint, don’t look so different from a plate of Russian pelmeni.

A cuisine of borderlands in its truest sense. This classification is not intended to discredit its authenticity or rootedness in its geography. Rather, Uyghur cuisine shows the arbitrary nature of culinary canons built around national lines.

Surely, homecooking in Maine and New Brunswick bear more in common with one another than either does with the culinary traditions of Texas or British Columbia, respecitvely.

Regardless, all I know is that when I have the option, this is the cuisine I choose.