The Road of Excess

I’m on the Silk Road, in Xinjiang, far north-west China, braving the slippery icy streets of Urumqi to find a restaurant. I’m in pursuit of the perfect Uyghur-style polo-- an oily fragrant rice and mutton dish in a similar vein to a Middle Eastern pilaf—and the owner of the hostel I’m staying in has given me handwritten directions to the best polo in the city. Unwittingly, I have walked past the inauspicious entrance to the restaurant several times. Up a creaky, narrow stairs on the second floor are two small rooms, four tables, and a beaded curtain leading to the kitchen. A refrigerator stands in the corner of one of the rooms. The tables are covered with plastic cloths. But I’m a tired and hungry traveller, with cold hands and sore feet, and the smells coming from the kitchen make my mouth water. My host, an exceptionally friendly Uyghur man shows me to a seat and quickly returns with a pot of tea and then disappears again. He doesn’t bring a menu, there is no menu. People come to this restaurant for one thing. He returns ten minutes later with a plate heaped with polo, a side dish of thinly julienned, pickled carrot and a bowl of glossy white yoghurt. The food is perfect for the minus-fourteen-degree weather; the rice is soft and oily and dotted with plump sun-dried raisons which offset the spiced mutton perfectly. The real delights are the side dishes-- the shredded carrot is tart and moreish, and the (obviously homemade) chilled pot-set yoghurt is silky, smooth and slippery on the tongue. I find myself wondering what sort of milk it is made from, as cow’s milk is rare in this part of China-- it could easily be goat or camel, but most likely sheep’s milk. It’s a fantastic start to my Uyghur food odyssey that will continue the next day as I head to Kashgar, a small desert town near China’s border with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.