A small storefront on Oxford’s Beech Street has housed many restaurants over the years. The most recent addition, Arman Uyghur Restaurant, serves a type of food that many probably haven’t tasted: Uyghur (pronounced “wee-goor”) cuisine. Its location in a small college town may be surprising, but the owners hope their restaurant will help educate Miami University students and others who venture in for a bite to eat.
Hailing from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China, the Uyghurs are a primarily Muslim ethnic group who have been subject to persecution for years. Activists and survivors—including the owners of Arman Uyghur Restaurant, Daniyaer Kudusi and his wife Umar—have cited such indignities as being forbidden from speaking the Uyghur language in schools and in public, the destruction of their mosques, and being forced to eat pork and drink beer despite religious and cultural prohibitions.
The Uyghur population in the United States is relatively small—around 10,000, according to the Uyghur American Association—and there are only a handful of Uyghur restaurants throughout the country. The Kudusis came to the U.S. in 2017, and Daniyaer worked in restaurants in New York City and Boston before moving his family to Ohio last fall to open his own restaurant.
Despite attempts to erase Uyghur culture in their homeland, Daniyaer says Arman Uyghur is he and his wife’s way of keeping it alive. Their cuisine serves as tangible evidence of a culture; religion, trade history, resources, war, and natural events all influence how a culture eats. “We have 8,000 years of history,” Daniyaer says. “We are a very old nation.”
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF CAROLINE BECKMAN
So what is Uyghur food? As Daniyaer emphasizes, it’s not Chinese food. The cuisine is made up of noodles, lamb, and chicken as well as a versatile yogurt that’s used in main dishes, sides and even drinks and a staple flatbread called nángbĭng, a leavened bread that’s drier and crispier than its Indian counterpart. The food is halal (permissible by Muslim dietary customs), and it bears resemblance to other Central Asian cuisines, such as those in Kazakh and Uzbek.
Although many Uyghur dishes are meat-centric, there are vegetarian options at Arman Uyghur Restaurant, such as a meatless version of laghman, a dish of hand-pulled noodles and vegetables usually served with fried lamb or beef. Daniyaer is especially proud of his laghman, describing it as even better than back home and declaring it “the best right now in [the] USA.”
With dine-in and carryout options, Arman Uyghur serves familiar dishes and ingredients like stir fry, yogurt topped with raisins and the diner’s choice of fruit or honey, tofu, and rice, as well as dishes many diners may be unfamiliar with, such as mung bean jelly topped with a spicy sauce, cucumber, and chickpeas.
Despite the hardships in their homeland, the Uyghurs’ cuisine is popular in China, and Daniyaer hopes to spread that popularity to his adopted country, with the goal of opening the first Uyghur-style fast casual brand in the United States.
“I want to mix American food and Uyghur food together,” he says. “We want to make good, healthy food for the people here.”
Arman Uyghur Restaurant, 15 S. Beech St., Oxford, (513) 255-9063
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