Obscure Uighur cuisine pops up at pub
When Zulpukar “Carl” Bahtiyar moved to San Francisco from his native Xinjiang, China, in 2012, he encountered a particular type of homesickness: the culinary variety.
For all of the Bay Area’s international diversity, Uighur food (pronounced WEE-gur) — the cuisine of the Muslims of northwest China — hasn’t made many inroads here. So Bahtiyar teamed up with his dad, a retired history professor, to start making the food of their home country in an unlikely place: an underused kitchen deep within a pub in the Sunset District.
“I really love to eat our food and there is no place to find it,” says Bahtiyar. “This is for me.”
It’s for the rest of us, too, even if we have to go to his 3-month-old Uyghur Taamliri (“Uighur cuisine”) pop-up at Chug Pub on Lincoln Way at 20th Avenue to get it. Bahtiyar is friends with the pub’s owner, who suggested that the fatherson team might want to try out the whole restaurant thing there first before fully investing in it.
The setting is an odd fit. Dishes can take a while to come out, which means time spent waiting at the pub’s sticky tables and dodging pool cues. A soundtrack of Tom Petty songs mixed with beeps and blips from the Pac-Man machine is not exactly an ideal setting to experience an obscure cuisine for the first time.
I was willing to forgive more than that upon the arrival of the Big Chicken dish — hunks of bone-in chicken marinated in a broth fragrant with peppers, star anise, cinnamon and numbing Sichuan peppercorns, all of it soaked up by hand-pulled noodles.
Culturally and ethnically, the Uighurs are closer to Kazakhs, Uzbeks and other Central Asian people than the rest of the Chinese, and that’s reflected in their food. Like the cuisine of Xi’an, which we’ve seen spotlighted in a few new restaurants over the past year, Uighur food is heavy on Silk Road influences. There is some heat, but it’s the dull kind that hits you in the back of the throat. Expect a lot of lamb and a lot of cumin.
Maybe because father and son don’t have much restaurant experience, the menu is almost entirely Uighur. But even though they don’t make many allowances for those who aren’t familiar with the food, Bahtiyar is happy to explain whatever questions you have. The best way to try it is just to jump in.
The pop-up’s excellently chewy hand-pulled noodles are spotlighted in the laghman, where they’re draped with a richly spiced gravy and a heap of vegetables. Soups like sorpa, a traditional soup heavy on lamb fat, are good choices to cut through the Sunset fog. Lamb fans will be won over by a flat pie called gösnan, which covers chopped meat and vegetables with a flaky pastry shell glistening with butter. There are also juicy, thick-skinned dumplings, a rare sign of the Chinese influence, and the obligatory lamb and beef skewers.
I’ll readily admit that I don’t have much of a frame of reference for this cuisine, and though I loved several of the dishes, there were a few that I couldn’t get my palate behind, like the weekends-only polo, a take on pilaf that involves grated carrots, buttery rice and hunks of lamb. For some reason, I couldn’t square the sweetness of the carrots with the savory nature of everything else.
But polo is Bahtiyar’s favorite and, as he said, this is his way of reconnecting with the country that he left three years ago. Judging by the excited comments on Yelp and Chowhound, he’s not the only one whose homesickness has been cured.