Dolan Uyghur Restaurant, Springvale, Melbourne

Heard of Uyghur people and their food? Me neither. They're an ethnic minority from Xinjiang; a region of China that borders places like Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. The people are Muslims and their food predominantly Halal. That translates to plenty of lamb and kebabs. And they have a representation of their cuisine down in Springvale (10 Queens Avenue, Springvale, Melbourne, tel : +61 3 9546 0698)

We started off with some Uyghur yoghurt. It tasted like lassi that is lightly sweetened so nothing unexpected or surprising there.

We had a couple of their noodle dishes. The first was their Tohu Goshi Langmeni. I'm guessing that the last word "langmeni" is derived from the Chinese la mian - which means pulled noodles. This one was of the flat variety, somewhat similar to pappardelle in appearance; stir fried with some vegetables and chicken. The texture of those flat noodles were springy and pleasant. Not a springy texture that I could say that I had experienced before though. I thought this was pretty good.

The other noodles looked like regular thick noodles that were chopped to short bits. This dish, called Qanalgan Korma Langmeni was cooked with different vegetables (celery and carrots) and minced lamb in some stock which might have had a tomato base. It wasn't very spicy in spite of appearances but was flavoursome the same.

One of the kickass items that they do rather well was their lamb skewers. These were chunkier than those quite easily found yang rou chuan that we have back home. While this had a less heavy hand on the seasoning, both varieties were delicious in their own cumin-y and salty way.

There were also chicken skewers which were no less tasty. The spice mix as you might have guessed are the same for all their meats. For the first time, it hit me that these tasted very much like tandoori chicken. Too bad the lamb tripe wasn't as good as I had imagined. The seasoning didn't cling very well to the tripe which resulted in some bits lacking flavour.

We ordered a plate of their stir fried lamb offal which included lungs, heart and liver. This was very nicely done. Those innards were thin sliced and rather tender. This dish would have been awesome with rice.