By the time you read this, Dilara will be no more.
Finsbury Park’s finest has closed with little fanfare, and it’s only by chance that I even know to mourn possibly the best Uyghur restaurant in London. Like every good north London foodie this weekend, I should have been eating at Tollington’s, the new Spanish fish bar opening from the chefs behind The Plimsoll. But a big group and a bigger queue meant that proved impossible, sending us back to our local safe space.
From the outside it may have looked a little like any other Blackstock Road kebab shop but, alongside Etles in Walthamstow, Dilara was for several years one of London’s only two outposts for Uyghur food, catering for and beyond a community that numbered only in the hundreds when both restaurants opened in 2017.
The majority-Muslim ethnic group from China’s northwest Xinjiang province is sadly best known now for widespread reports of illegal mistreatment and perhaps even genocide carried out against them by the government. There have never been many Uyghurs in London, but their culinary presence is ever-growing, in no small part thanks to Dilara’s impact: it and Etles are now joined by Karamay, Turpan, Kefil, and more.
To boil things down to the probably-too-basic, Uyghur cuisine sits somewhere between northern Chinese cooking and the food of Turkey and the Middle East. Lamb is ever-present, usually spiced heavily with cumin, as likely to be accompanied by thick, beltlike noodles as it is charred flatbreads. Kebabs sit alongside stir-fries, dumplings followed in the menu by samosas.
I couldn’t begin to count how many times I’ve been to Dilara since Vivian first took me four years ago, and naturally we have a near-nailed on order. We’ve deviated over the years, but rarely for long - nothing we’ve eaten here is bad, but not everything is the best.
Cumin lamb skewers are a must, usually skinny but heavy with spice and fat, so hot and slick that you learn to pull the meat from the skewer using the accompanying flatbread like a protective sleeve. Samsas are a relatively recent addition to our rotation, pastries that share only the broad ‘lamb+pastry’ structure with their namesake samosas, here served round, plump, and filled with simply seasoned chunks of tender lamb.
The smacked cucumber salad is one of the few left in London to run less than a tenner, an important threshold for what’s essentially half a cucumber that someone’s bothered a bit. Cold liangpi noodles are cut into thick, jiggly slabs, dressed lightly in chilli oil.
The star dish is ‘da pan ji’, quite directly translated as ‘large plate chicken’, and confusingly offered in both medium and large serving sizes. The correct order, naturally, is the large large plate chicken with extra noodles. The thick, hand-pulled belts of dough are not only the best part of this dish but, on their day, among the best noodles in London, and it’s inevitable to want more of them.
They’re served floating amongst a deep orange broth studded with star anise and tingly szechuan peppercorns. Generous cuts of chicken threaten to slide off the bone, matched in quantity only by the hefty potatoes that complete the double-carb effect. A Szechuan dish originally, adopted and perfected by the Uyghurs, this is hot, numbing, and hopelessly compelling, a plate you’ll pick at long after your appetite has left the room.
So why, oh why, is Dilara closing? I might have feared for it based on demand, its large, bright dining room rarely empty but never especially busy. In fact, it was the final visitor to that dining room the other night that provided the clue: a chancer who wandered in, seemingly hoping for a stray smartphone to lift, left to owner Aman Gul to chase out.
He’s one of many, she says, enough to leave her fed up of Finsbury Park, so she’s closing up shop after seven years. The good news: she’s not done yet, with plans to open somewhere new, more central. The better news: it turns out she already has - unbeknownst to me, Holborn’s Tarim is hers too, boasting a similar menu of Uyghur and Turkish food that I only hope can fill Dilara’s boots.
I’ll be along to Tarim soon, and no doubt to Gul’s next opening too, whatever and wherever it will be. But a restaurant is more than its menu, and so Dilara itself will always hold a place in my heart — a spot for large large plate chicken, sizzling skewers, and a reliable refuge from the temptation to spend the night queuing at the hype spot.