The Uyghurs are a Turkic Muslim minority primarily based in China’s north-western Xinjiang region. They are marginalized and oppressed, many are missing.
It’s amazing then that two young men, aged 35 and 28, opened a restaurant near my own home in Union City. At first, it was a small shop. We ate there with E’s friends and had to wait a long time for a table. The food is spicy and savory. Easily, our favorite was the Nan-Gosh Qorumisi: bits of bread first deep fried until crispy and then stir fried with beef.
It’s crazy good food.
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The Spectacular Culinary World of Muslim Chinese Immigrants
It's a cuisine that's been molded by persecution, heartbreak and centuries of Silk Road migration. Now it's finding a new home in the U.S.
The test of any great Uyghur cook is to make a perfect, uninterrupted loop of noodle using only a ball of flour, water and their two hands. It’s a process that announces itself with a thwack and a tap tap tap — the sound of that ball becoming a circle, then a figure-eight and back again, over and over, until the threads start to multiply in their hands like a fast illusion.
This is the heart of laghman, which is perhaps the most iconic dish in the Uyghur Muslim culinary tradition: a nest of the thick, chewy (singular!) noodle topped with a stir-fry of meat, vegetables and simple seasonings like cumin and white pepper, with a dash of chili flakes for color and heat. The elemental combination of flour and water has always been an important one in Northern China, where wheat surpasses rice as the staple grain. But while the hand-stretching technique might be similar, Uyghur laghman stands apart from Chinese noodle tradition, much like the history of the people itself.
