At this Mississauga restaurant, a small but mighty menu celebrates the cuisine of the Uyghur people

Metro Morning's food guide Suresh Doss joins the program every week to discuss one of the many great GTA eateries he's discovered.

This week, he takes us to Taam Cuisine in Mississauga. 

Below is a lightly edited transcript of Doss's conversation with guest host Piya Chattopadhyay. 

Doss: Before the past four or five years, you could count the number of Uyghur restaurants in the GTA — places that cook dishes specific types of noodle dishes, kebabs and rice dishes that are representative of the Uyghur people from Xinjiang region in China. But more recently, we have started to see a number of small restaurants pop up. A lot of them tend to be in the Mississauga, Oakville and Etobicoke corridor, as I understand it, because this is where the community is growing. So if you're looking to get acquainted with Uyghur cuisine, I recommend going to Mississauga.

Chattopadhyay: Tell me more about where the restaurant you're featuring this week is.

Suresh Doss: It's a very small restaurant, tucked away in a strip mall in Mississauga's Lorne Park neighbourhood, a very quiet part of the city, near Lakeshore Road.

Taam Cuisine is run by a wonderful family of self-taught cooks. They opened the restaurant just before the pandemic and didn't have the best luck, as you can imagine. Over the past three years they've flipped the menu a few times and even rebranded as a Mexican restaurant. But late last year, the family decided they wanted to return to their roots and cook the cuisine of their culture. 

Chattopadhyay: So what do you recommend we order to get a good sense of Uyghur cuisine? 

Doss: While the menu is limited, everything on it is great. You will see a menu of kebabs, skewers of bite-sized meat coated in a punchy dry rub and then grilled. You also get quite a bit of dry pepper spice, cumin on the skewers. The hallmark here is the hand-pulled noodles, cooked on a high heat wok. If you're going to Taam, I would highly recommend you spend some time with the hand-pulled menu. 

Chattopadhyay: Can you describe it to me?

Doss: They make their own noodles in house, which is rare. After, they repurpose the noodle in a few different ways. So there's the idea of the long noodle, dough that is carefully rolled into a thick long noodle, curled very gently. Then you have protein and vegetables that are cooked over a ripping hot wok and as soon as the sauce starts to bubble aggressively, they toss in the noodles.

Chattopadhyay: Is there a vegetarian option?

Doss: Yes. totally, you can get it with a load of vegetables then get a nice char from the wok. You can also get the long noodle with beef or lamb, which are very common proteins used in Uyghur cuisine. So that's one type of noodle.

There's another version where the long noodle is chopped up into small, pinky-sized noodles, and once again, fried in a wok with a slightly different combination of spices and accompaniments. They're called ding ding noodles, which are really rare to find in the GTA. The dish has a totally different mouthfeel because you're not slurping the noodles, you're spooning them. Because of this, there's this wonderful balance between the noodle texture and the combination of pepper and vegetables. Can I recommend a third noodle dish?

Chattopadhyay: Absolutely. 

Doss: Okay, so there's this dish called "the chicken stew" on the menu. Picture chunks of bone-in chicken that's fried and then tossed in a wok, which creates this really wonderful texture. They become really tender on the inside, and they're served in this glossy spicy sauce on a bed of flat noodles. This time, the noodle is flattened and then cut into small rectangular strips. It's quite the full course so I would order that dish if you're with a group. I should also warn you that it's fairly spicy, so you might want to cool down after your meal by ordering their homemade yogurt, a slightly thick yogurt, accented by salt.