Xinjiang cuisine in London: for Uygur restaurants’ owners it’s about sharing their culture
- At Etles in Walthamstow and Dilara in Finsbury Park, the owners offer dishes that give Londoners insight into Uygur traditions, culture and religion
- The city has proved a welcoming place to introduce Uygur cuisine thanks to its cosmopolitan food scene and gastronomically curious population
Restaurateur Mukaddes Yadikar looks through her dining room window, framed with loops of brightly patterned fabric, as a cold, bleak sky darkens above the rain-stained pavements of northeast London. “We love England,” she says.
Yadikar is from Yili prefecture in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. She is Uygur, a member of a Muslim Turkic ethnic group estimated to comprise almost half Xinjiang’s population of around 20 million.
She met her husband, Ablikim Rahman, in Turkey, and moved to England in 2010 to join him in Manchester, where he was studying.
Keen to open a Uygur restaurant, Yadikar felt that London – with its diverse and gastronomically curious population – would be the best place. When the couple opened Etles in April 2017, there was only one other Uygur restaurant in the country: Karamay, which opened in 2015 in the central English city of Leicester.
For London’s first authentic Uygur restaurant, Yadikar would have preferred a central London location, but it was beyond her budget. Instead she chose the Walthamstow district, which had been gaining a reputation as a culinary destination that offered a choice of international cuisines. She named her 35-seat space Etles after the colourful Uygur fabric she uses to make curtains and table runners.
Traditional Uygur cuisine is heavy on starch and meat. Halal lamb, beef and chicken is placed onto skewers and roasted or stewed. Little is wasted: kidneys make tender kebabs, marinated ox tripe is served cold, and lamb hoof is cooked slowly to make a comforting stew.