The lamb skewers and charcoal chicken hearts show off the grill skills of the chef. Photo: Lucy Ridge.
Uyghur Cuisine is a Halal restaurant tucked on the edge of Emu Bank in Belconnen. It’s a casual, slightly chaotic place with a many-paged menu and little in the way of service. But what it lacks in niceties, Uyghur Cuisine more than makes up for in flavour.
Uyghur people are an ethnic group – mostly Muslim – from the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of North Western China, which sits at the crossroads between Central and East Asia. Uyghur food has lots of hearty meat dishes, noodles and dumplings and is often spiced with Szechuan pepper and cumin.
The Uyghur Cuisine restaurant specialises in charcoal barbecued dishes, and a story on the front of the menu gives a folkloric tale of how this cooking style originated. The tale goes that a man came home to find his house had burnt down, but followed a delicious scent and discovered that “His lamb was roasted and red and raw. He tasted it and tasted it. It tasted good. The yard burned. He was sad, but he was pleased to find a new way to eat lamb.”
That’s what I call finding a silver lining!
Uyghur Cuisine in Belconnen serves up some excellent charcoal meats and delicious noodle dishes. Photo: Lucy Ridge.
Obviously we needed to try some of this legendary lamb for ourselves. With two days’ notice, you can order a whole roasted lamb, but with only two of us to feed, we turned the menu to the lengthy kebab section and ordered the lamb skewers.
The long metal skewers are served on a wooden board with pieces of lamb spiced with a dry chilli and cumin rub. The meat is tender and beautifully charred. We also order some skewers with charcoal chicken hearts, which come with six hearts apiece. If you haven’t had heart before, chargrilled is the way to go! The texture and flavour are meaty and less confronting than some other types of offal, and the chilli cumin spice rub also worked really well.
To go with the meats, we enjoyed the cucumber salad with garlic and carrot, which came with the fattest, chewiest glass noodles I’ve ever tasted, all drenched in a pleasantly mouth-tingling spicy Szechuan dressing (with a hefty aftertaste of garlic).
Fluffy steamed lamb dumplings were a nice addition to the meal. Photo: Lucy Ridge.
A variety of dumplings are on offer, but we went with two steamed lamb buns – similar in style to a BBQ pork bun you might get at Yum Cha – which were soft and had a tasty minced lamb and vegetable filling. A few other tables around us had ordered steamed dumplings, which looked very tempting, too.
Although we were filling up fast (and sweating buckets from the chilli), we took the plunge and ordered one more dish from the noodle section of the menu (just to get a good cross-section of what was on offer). Among options like stewed chilli chicken noodles, we decided on the handmade noodles in homemade sauce with lamb and vegetables. A sticky, mildly spicy and slightly sweet sauce coated the dish. The texture of the noodles was outstanding: bouncy, chewy and moreish.
The handmade noodles are chewy and totally delicious. Photo: Lucy Ridge.
Although our choices mostly contained meat, there is a decent selection of vegetarian dishes on the menu, too, like stir-fried spicy tofu, baby bok choy with mushroom, and di san xian, stir-fried eggplant with potato and capsicum. The kebab section also features vegetarian options like grilled eggplant, grilled Chinese chives and coriander tofu skin rolls.
I’d love to return with a bigger group and have a proper feast of these kebab dishes, and the traditional Goosh Nan (panfried meat pie) looked very good too.
We had an excellent time exploring this lesser-known cuisine, and if you’ve got an adventurous palate, love a bit of spice and don’t mind going with the flow, then I’d definitely recommend putting Uyghur Cuisine on your foodie bucket list.
Uyghur Cuisine is located at Shop 4/114 Emu Bank, Belconnen. They are open seven days a week from 11.30 am to 3 pm and from 4.30 pm to 9.30 pm. A reduced menu is available for takeaway, order online.
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