You may have never had Uyghur or Uzbek cuisine, but it’ll taste familiar the minute you try it.
At the newly opened Marco & Polo Restaurant at 6504 American Boulevard in University Town Center in Hyattsville, the menu items include beef shish kebab, lamb chops, dolmas and baklava.
With influences from Central Asia, China and the Middle East — and, famously, influences on Italian cuisine — Uyghur cooking has similar tastes to dishes you’ve eaten elsewhere, but it’s just different enough to feel distinctive.
Be sure to try laghman noodles with beef (shown above) or lamb, the very dish that Marco Polo brought back to Italy and rebranded as spaghetti. (Since tomatoes are from the New World, you could think of spaghetti marinara as, essentially, American-Uyghur-Italian fusion cuisine.)
There’s also Big Plate Chicken, a chicken and potato stew served with flat noodles that became super popular in urban China, where it’s called Da Pan Ji.
Uyghurs (pronounced WEE-grr) are an ethic minority group from western China and Central Asia. Over the last few years, expats have opened up several restaurants in the D.C. metro area specializing in Uyghur cuisine. The Washington Post reported there are now about as many restaurants serving Uyghur food in the Washington area as there are in New York.
If things are slow, owner Gairatjan Rozi will be happy to fill you in on Uyghur culture and cuisine, as well as the troubled history of his homeland. Or you can ask about his fascinating personal life.
As the owner of a mid-sized clothing factory in Turkestan in the 1990s, Rozi specialized in traditional clothing as well as modern leather work, but his outspokenness on Chinese communism led him to get asylum in 2000 in the Netherlands, where he ran a Uyghur restaurant for many years.
While there, he continued his political work in partnership with anti-communist Chinese and Tibetans in exile, even meeting personally with the Dalai Lama.
Located across from the temporary library at University Town Center, Marco & Polo is open from 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekends with live music Friday and Saturday nights.
