This uniquely over the top restaurant is an interesting addition to the city’s Xinjiang dining scene. The restaurant claims to represent Xinjiang taste with Xinjiang chefs and Xinjiang wait staff and from the moment you enter, you’re greeted by a beautiful Uyghur woman and guided into a crazy interior, a massive hall with wooden floors and ceilings with chandeliers hanging down, touches of dark red around, and tables set with ornate china and wine glasses.
what the hell does this look like?
"fine" china at a Xinjiang restaurant?!?
The menu has all your typical Xinjiang favorites, though the prices can be downright shocking at times, like RMB88 for stewed lamb with naan (nang bao rou 囊包肉), RMB20+ for noodle dishes, and RMB10 for lamb kebabs (羊肉串). Unfortunately, the high prices don’t equate to larger portion sizes, in fact, some are smaller than what you’d find at other, much cheaper, spots around town.
That’s not to say the food we had here wasn’t good, on two visits a large variety of what the menu had to offer was sampled, including many of their specialities and almost everything was satisfying. The stir fried naan and lamb (nang chao rou 囊炒肉) really stood out and their big plate chicken (dapan ji 大盘鸡) and polo (shou zhua fan 手抓饭) were all pleasing.
big plate of lamby naany goodness
I’m not without my complaints about this spot. First, while the presentation of the 囊包肉 looked impressive, for RMB88, I’d expect a lot more meat than what we got. Yes, they do a decent job with the presentation, but the reality was that the meat was another 2 pieces of naan could be found on top of the bottom layers to create the illusion of a lot more food than what you see here. A similar problem of miserly serving occurred with the big plate chicken, served without the noodles that make it such a great dish. I’ve never been to Xinjiang before, but many of the dishes struck me as being far spicier than the versions you’d find elsewhere in the city.
a small serving of big plate chicken, sans noodles
Tumaris has some serious service/kitchen issues, but perhaps these can be chalked up to the fact it has been open for a few months at most. Unfortunately, when you’re paying these kind of prices, you expect something closer to perfection, especially because, with its design, it seems made for business dining. Despite being almost completely empty on multiple visits, it took awhile for a server to come by and take our order and throughout both meals, there were a number of wonky service problems. The biggest of the issues was that some (HOT!) dishes came out within minutes of ordering them (and before we’d even gotten drinks), while others took over a half hour before they hit the table.
Where does that leave us? The food’s good, but there are plenty of Xinjiang restaurants (some good, some popular) not very far from Tumaris, none charging the same high prices. Again, I’m not an expert on Xinjiang cuisine, but I don’t find this restaurant to be any more authentic than a spot like Crescent Moon. And despite their claim that 70-80% of the staff is from Xinjiang, it doesn’t look that way. The restaurant also has a nightly floor show and just for those business eaters, has high end seafood including lobster, shark fin, and sea cucumber. The one saving grace for this spot is their lunch specials that include big plate noodle or stir fried beef and potatos (土豆炒牛肉) for RMB38 (including rice and orange juice or salty milk tea) or RMB28 for polo or xinjiang noodles. Will the lunch special keep this place in business or is it going to get beaten down by the far more established spots in the area.
Hi! Thanks for the review. If I were in Beijing, I’d check this place out.
It seems to me Tumaris is another instance of an emerging genre of Uyghur restaurants grouped, ironically, under the label téz tamaqxanisi, or “fast food restaurant.” While to the Western ear “fast food” automatically connotes low quality (an almost all counts!) in Xinjiang téz tamaqxanisi has become the umbrella term for those extremely high-end (particularly compared to typical Xinjiang salaries), very ornately decorated restaurants with costumed waiters, exotic oases-palace style architecture, and song-and-dance performances. It’s basically been over the course of the past decade or so that enterprising Uyghur businessmen realized that packaging Uyghur food not just as food but also as multi-faceted experience can be lucrative. I’ve met a restauranteer who wants to open similar restaurants in Japan and in the West; personally, I think doing so would work well because of the cultural appeal.
In my experience with téz tamaxaniliri in Xinjiang, it was similar to you – really over-the-top presentation but stingy with the portion sizes. Guess they gotta recoup their losses somewhere, heh heh.
As for the dapanji, I don’t know how “authentic” a Uyghur experience Tumaris has in mind, but when in Xinjiang, among dapanji restaurants that only Uyghurs frequent, the practice is you get the dapanji, eat some of it, and then in the middle of eating call the waiter to dump a plate of fresh noodles on it. I personally never bothered to ask why that was the case but I enjoyed it as eating the spicy dapanji got the juices flowing and then you could use the noodles later to soak up the sauces collected in the bottom of the pan.
That may have been the case at Tumaris – but then again, I’m imagining that most of its clientele are non-Uyghur so their wouldn’t be that expectation of “They’ll call me when they want noodles and if they don’t call me they don’t want noodles.” Maybe you can try it next time?
@Porfiriy Thanks for your in depth comment, I had no idea that this was a trend that may be going global. About the dapanji, perhaps I’m just lucky, but the Xinjiang places I frequented would always have the noodles with the dish, either straight out of the kitchen or, like you said, added afterwords. When asked about it, they said that’s not how they serve their version (on the set lunch menu, it comes with a bowl of rice). Anyways, thanks again for stopping by!
You’re right–RMB 100 per person? You’re paying for the interior, I guess…and the wine glasses.