(Editor’s Note: In almost a decade of intrepid eating in Istanbul, we still miss the immigrant community restaurants we know from the American big cities where language barriers and foreign customs make a lunch into a real adventure. Istanbul has foreign communities and it has foreign restaurants but the two rarely seem to meet. It wasn’t until we visited Zeytinburnu that what we were looking for, Little Uighurstan.)

Thwap. Thwap. Thwap.

“Do you hear that?” asked Sean Roberts, an expert on Uighur culture and politics and our dining companion for the day. “They’re making the lagman.”

As if inspired by the image of a pizza-maker spinning dough on his finger like a basketball and tossing it in the air, lagman-makers have a similar choreography that includes a deep swing, a flip and a smack of the thick braid of noodles. But unlike pizza dough, lagman noodles have escaped mass production; they are handmade by definition. As fat and chewy as udon at certain points and thin like spaghetti at others, a bowl of lagman is full of surprises. The generous topping of sautéed finely-chopped lamb, fresh red and green peppers that came with the suyru lagman (guyru lagman comes with a more chunky variety of the same ragu) was a delicious and spicy change of pace from the milder Turkish pallete.

“This is a good lagman. I’m sweating,” said Roberts.

The location of these thwapping noodles was Zeytinburnu, an Istanbul neighborhood that seems almost as far off of the beaten path as the Silk Road oasis of Kashgar. The last stop on the tramway, it’s a busy little district with a pleasant central pedestrian boulevard lined with that particular style of concrete blocks present throughout all Turkish cities, architectural non-sequiturs. At street level on the main drag, it seems this area is all about the trade of leather jackets, much like the shopping streets of Laleli and Aksaray. But look a little closer and you’ll notice banners in Arabic script and blue and white star and crescent flags in upper level windows, an old-timer with a long stringy beard strolling down the main street in a black velvet skull cap with embroidered totems, the signs of a coherent community of people from a place in the west of China described as Eastern Turkistan, the Uighur of Zeytinburnu.

Often idealized in Turkey as the proto-Turks, the Uighur have enjoyed a privileged status since the 1950’s and their community in Zeytinburnu has steadily grown since then. Though it’s increasingly difficult to leave China and enter Turkey these days, newcomers still arrive regularly, like the cook at Turkestani Restaurant, who took our order with a bashful smile and not a word of Turkish.

We visited three Uighur restaurants in Zeytinburnu, sampling the large Uighur-style manti dumplings, somsa, a savory pastry stuffed with lamb and, of course, lagman. The food was all very good, but it was the scene that captured our attention. We were reminded of tight-knit communities in Queens or the West Bank of New Orleans, where restaurants play a key role in cultural preservation. At one spot, Pan-Turkic newspapers were stacked on one table, while the soft lilt of the Uighur language filtered through a privacy screen where a mother fed her children Kashgar kebab and teenagers gathered around a huge flat-screen to watch a Uighur crooner’s concert DVD.  At Ipek Yolu, another of the neighborhood’s restaurants, we even met the director of a local Uighur kindergarten.

In Istanbul, foreign communities rarely settle and thrive the way the Uighur have, so foreign restaurants rarely feel – or taste – authentic. But in Zeytinburnu, rest assured, there is a Uighur at the next table keeping the cook honest. The lagman will be as fresh and tasty as it is in Kashgar. And the noodles will always be audibly handmade.

Turkistan Restaurant
Address: 63 Sokak #5, Zeytinburnu
Telephone: (212) 547-3822

Urumci Lokantasi
Address: 50/5 Sokak #3, Zeytinburnu
Telephone: (212) 665-2813

Ipek Yolu Restaurant
Address: 60^th Sokak 28 (behind Ziraat Bankasi two blocks back, on the right), Zeytinburnu
Telephone: (530) 923-4088

But we’re not quite sure in what category we would place Zinnet, an appealing Central Asian restaurant located deep inside a newly-created park just outside Istanbul’s old city walls. On the one hand, the surprisingly large park that is the restaurant’s home is one of the few green spaces to be found in Istanbul. On the other hand, the park itself is hemmed in by several noisy highways and has a desolate, almost surreal feeling to it – used more by stray dogs than actual people on a recent fall day.

Although called Kultur Parki, the only sign of “culture” that we found was a derelict amphitheater overgrown with weeds. The restaurant itself is located inside a borderline bizarre compound that’s home to a gaily-decorated yurt and several small wooden buildings that act as mini showcases for the various Turkic republics of Central Asia, a kind of pint sized, poor man’s Epcot Center.

Still, we’re suckers for the hearty food of Central Asia – surprisingly hard to find in Istanbul, despite the proximity and strong ethnic bonds to the region – so we hopped on the tram the other day and headed to Zinnet to check things out.

The restaurant, run by a Uighur family from the city of Urumqi in western China, is inside one of the buildings of Kultur Park’s Turkic republic complex and has an airy, slightly upscale feel to it. We were a bit concerned when we first arrived. Like Kultur Parki itself, Zinnet was devoid of any human presence, save for a Kazakh woman who serves as the restaurant’s waitress and hostess. The extensive menu, though, a kind of Silk Road culinary greatest hits collection, was promising. Things started looking up as soon as a small – and very tasty – complimentary salad arrived (along with a group who started watching a Uighur musical on a large television screen mounted on one of the walls). Made of thin slivers of a crunchy vegetable we couldn’t recognize (uncooked potato, it turned out!) that were bathed in a red pepper and sesame oil dressing, the salad packed a flavorful and satisfying punch. A soup called çüçüre, made of a spicy broth that had delicious little tortellini-like meat-filled dumplings floating in it, hit the spot on a chilly day.

Zinnet’s Uighur-style manti, gyoza-sized steamed dumplings filled with roughly-chopped fatty meat and topped with zingy malt vinegar and spicy pepper oil, were outstanding. The fragrant zireli kebap, a stir-fry of beef and onions, had the look of a Chinese dish but the earthy spicing of a Middle Eastern one. We ended our meal with an order of lagman, the hand-made noodle dish that is a Central Asian staple. Although good, the noodles lacked the depth of character of those made by the cook at Dogu Türkistan Vakfi Aş Evi, a no-frills Uighur restaurant we reviewed a few months ago.

With main dishes averaging around 15 lira, Zinnet might seem a bit pricey, at least considering the rustic style of the food. Then again, since the only other way to taste what Zinnet serves would be to book a flight to Tashkent or Kashgar, think of the place as an absolute bargain – with a great location, to boot.

(Note: to get to Zinnet, take the Zeytinburnu-Kabatas tramway and get off at the Topkapi station, just outside the city walls (not near Topkapi Palace). Take the stairs up from the tram station and head north and into Kultur Parki. Look for the collection of small buildings and the yurt straight ahead.)

Address: Turk Dunyasi Kultur Evleri No: 6, Kultur Parki, Topkapi, Istanbul
Phone: 212-567-1077
Web: www.zinnetrestaurant.com

(photo by Yigal Schleifer)

With the particularly uncatchy name of Dogu Türkistan Vakfi Aş Evi (or East Turkistan Foundation Food House), it’s clear this restaurant is not aiming for mass-market appeal. Rather, the place functions as a kind of public service agency. Located inside the charming and very pleasant courtyard of a 16^th-century former medresa (religious school), Dogu Türkistan Vakfi Aş Evi (DTVAE from here on) serves up hearty dishes for homesick exiled Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic people who hail from western China’s Xinjiang province, or “East Turkistan” as it is known in Turkey.

Turks and Uighurs share a linguistic bond, and many in Turkey romantically think of the Uighurs as the “original” Turks. But the two people also share a strong culinary bond, with Uighur cooking providing perhaps a blueprint of what “original” Turkish cooking might have tasted like. Where the classic Turkish kitchen reflects a mix various regional influences (Aegean, Middle Eastern, Balkan) and the highfalutin tastes of the Ottoman court, Uighur cooking retains the simplicity of what were originally a nomadic people. So simple, in fact, that the menu at  DTVAE is basically limited to three items – and two of them are different takes on manti, the traditional Turkish dumpling.

The restaurant’s centerpiece dish is lagman, a main staple of Uighur cooking, which is made from handmade noodles that are boiled and served along with a stir-fry of beef, onions and green peppers. On a recent visit to DTVAE, the head-scarved cook was busy in the kitchen rolling out long strips of lagman, which somewhat resemble udon noodles. In another room, an older man was methodically stuffing small pockets of dough with a ground meat mixture to make one of the restaurant’s manti dishes. Boiled and then topped with yogurt and red pepper flakes, the manti was delicious, putting most of the other versions found around town — which seem to favor dough over filling —  to shame. The restaurant’s other manti dish – a much larger dough pocket stuffed with a meat/onion mixture and which reminded us of a Chinese soup dumpling – was also very nice, especially when eaten with a schmear of the oily, red pepper paste that we found in a jar on the table.

DTVAE has a few outside tables, where you can eat under the shade of three massive maple trees, and a handful of tables inside. The restaurant – a peaceful oasis located on a side street not far from the grand Suleymaniye Mosque – is connected to a Uighur cultural center housed inside the medresa, and on a recent visit, the place was plastered with copies of articles from the Turkish press reporting about the recent ethnic violence in Xinjiang, in which some 200 Uighurs and Han Chinese died. Nearby us sat small groups of Uighur men chatting and slurping up their lagman along with bowls of steaming green tea, transported back, as we were, to East Turkistan.

Address: Dedeefendi Cad. No: 4, Eminonu
Telephone: 212-512-6406

(photo by Yigal Schleifer)