
Wild Cumin’s lamb skewers ring with the restaurant’s namesake spice and a deep smokiness.
The smokiness stopped me mid-bite of my lamb skewer, and not in the “wildfire ahead” kind of way either, but just the opposite. The dusky smoke permeated the chunks of lamb, themselves tenderized by tidbits of fat threaded onto the skewer and nearly crusted in cumin and chili powder.
The kebab tasted of old men tending to outdoor grills at barebones shops identified only by puffs of meat-scented air rising in white wisps. It did not taste of gleaming white walls or the shiny red logo identifying it as Wild Cumin, one of the newest additions to Kent’s Chinese cuisine destination, the Great Wall Shopping Mall.

A high-powered hood allows Wild Cumin to grill over real coals.
After some cajoling, much concern, and a phone call to co-owner Mei Young, my server let me poke my head into the kitchen. A cook hunched over a narrow metal grate, using a paintbrush to season a curled cut of lamb spine, sizzling and spitting over the nuggets of glowing red-hot charcoal.
I was surprised such a set up was allowed, but Young assured me a super-powerful hood sucked the smoke right out, and both the health department and fire marshal fully approved the setup.
Something else surprised me even more: the chef. Running Wild Cumin’s kitchen was Chengbiao Yang, founder of Seven Stars Pepper Szechuan Restaurant, one of the first Sichuan restaurants in the city. After selling Seven Stars, he went on to open (then sell or close) a steady stream of restaurants, starting with Bellevue’s Szechuan Chef and Kirkland’s Spicy Talk. Then he began to explore different styles of food, first with Chinatown–International District individual hot pot spot Uway Malatang, then at Pike Place Market guo kui sandwich shop Country Dough. Renton lucked into his Nashville- and Sichuan-style spicy chicken sandwiches from 2020 to 2022, then he was back in Bellevue earlier this year with a short-lived northern Chinese restaurant called Mr. Goat Kitchen.

Naan is an essential part of Uyghur meals and culture.
Yang’s presence was both good news and bad. While I have followed his Sichuanese cooking around the city for decades, here he prepares the food of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. The Turkic Muslim Uyghur people are the majority there; their cuisine adheres to halal restrictions and shares more with Central Asian Turkic cuisines like Uzbek and Turkmen than Cantonese or Shanghainese. A Sichuanese chef cooking Uyghur cuisine raises concerns about the ways a minority cuisine is presented when cooked by someone from the majority.
China has been on a campaign against Uyghur culture and people since at least 2017, one that both the Trump and Biden administrations declared a genocide. Earlier this month, the New York Times published an in-depth look at how Uyghurs remain under China’s watchful eye and heavy thumb, even outside the country. Education efforts and more violent re-education efforts push Sinicization, even specifically focusing on the virtues of Han Chinese cuisines. “The Party-state is simultaneously removing Indigenous foods from Uyghur homes while serving up those same dishes as de-ethnicized ‘Xinjiang food’ for hungry Han tourists,” reported Timothy Grose for the ChinaFile earlier this year.

Wild Cumin makes naan in the clay tandoor oven on weekends.
Co-owner Young’s real estate firm manages the Great Wall Shopping Mall. She needed a new tenant to complement the anchor tenant, Asian supermarket 99 Ranch, and not compete with the current tenants—an array of Chinese spots serving dim sum, dumplings, Sichuanese, hot pot, and noodle soup. She called up Yang, with whom she became friends when she helped him find a location for Szechuan Chef. He suggested a halal Xinjiang Uyghur restaurant, because not only would they be the only ones serving that food in the mall, they would be the first ones in the state. Yang spent a decade living in the Xinjiang city of Kashgar and had been thinking about opening such a restaurant to share the cuisine he had loved there.
Young quickly clocked the added draw for the significant Muslim population in the area—Wild Cumin currently serves halal-style cuisine, and is in the process of filing for certification. While much of the customer base is Chinese people familiar with the cuisine, I also saw big South Asian groups dig into pots bubbling soup and hijab-clad women chatting over meals. The menu includes a $560 whole roasted lamb, for which Wild Cumin uses a special jug-shaped oven, an item created with mosques and Muslim community events in mind.
One server wears a kanway, a traditional Uyghur men’s shirt, and Uyghur style music plays softly in the dining room. Backlit displays on one wall highlight photos of Xinjiang’s desert landscape and famous mountains, which also show up in Wild Cumin’s logo. At the front, under screens playing shows about Uyghur cuisine, a cart holds a selection of colorful doppa, the four-cornered hat worn by Uyghur men. Small carpets hang on the wall, as they do in Uyghur homes, where they serve the dual purpose of adding beauty and warmth. On a third wall hang tantalizing photos of Uyghur food—the flaky-crusted, stuffed samsa bun, naan bread showing off a bronze tan and decorative pin-pricking, and cumin-crusted kebabs tilted over flavorful smoke.
Unfortunately, it was only the kebabs that could match up to the promise of pictures on the wall: The samsa filling, rich and meaty, comes wrapped in a lifeless crust. The thin center and deep color of the naan was nowhere to be seen on the pale, dense version at Wild Cumin, not even on weekends, when they are made in the clay tandoor oven. Naan is fundamental to the Uyghur people. If a man is strong, Uyghurs say that he ate naan growing up; an insult would be to say someone’s mom didn’t feed them naan.
Elsewhere, the menu held pleasant surprises: The slightly sweet Xinjiang salad of red onions, tomatoes, and cucumbers counteracts the richness of stewed and smoky meats. The resplendently fresh housemade yogurt comes drizzled with honey and dotted with raisins, smoothing over the barely detectable tartness. On my second visit, I learned from my first and ignored its listing under appetizers and enjoyed it instead for dessert. Endlessly long ropes of dough, wrangled into thick, flat strands attest that Yang remains a master of noodles.

Uyghur cuisine adheres to halal restrictions and shares more with Central Asian Turkic cuisines like Uzbek and Turkmen than Cantonese or Shanghainese.
Laghman is the dish that Naf, a local Uyghur entrepreneur, misses the most from home. Her mom makes her favorite food, pilaf, all the time, so she misses that less, but laghman noodles are time-consuming. While I enjoy Yang’s sturdy strands, Naf explains to me how they diverge from true Laghman: The oily sauce from the meat coats the noodle, rather than the noodles soaking up a broth like a sponge, as they should.
Naf, who requested we use only her first name, left her home in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, at age 13. After 10 years in Malaysia, Naf and her mother moved to Seattle in 2019, and during the pandemic, Naf started jarring Amina’s Recipe Uyghur Chili Garlic Hot Sauce. The idea came out of dinners shared with friends, and she began selling the sauce in the hopes that it would help other people gather, too.
“Growing up in China, I didn’t really learn about the Uyghur history and culture,” Naf says. She studied in Chinese and learned Chinese history and culture. Explaining to people that she is Uyghur and what that even is has been a challenge for her since she left Ürümqi. “Now I feel like, using my sauce, I’m able to introduce more of Uyghur, and at the same time, I’m learning about Uyghur, which is pretty fun.” She already demonstrates fluency in the fundamentals of existing as a Uyghur person in the world, choosing her words carefully and keeping her phone in airplane mode while speaking.
“My message with the sauce is it just to be able to introduce about the Uyghur people. To have awareness, that this is really happening,” Naf says. Even labeling her sauce as Uyghur is a big step.
China uses the word Xinjiang to describe the Uyghur homeland, a phrase that translates to “New Frontier” and makes clear from whose viewpoint it comes. Wild Cumin’s menu describes dishes as Xinjiang, and the English menu doesn’t use the dish names like samsa and laghman, but simply descriptions: roasted buns and meat over noodles.
Yang’s passion for Uyghur food comes through in the restaurant’s commitment, sourcing halal lamb from Australia and New Zealand, the round oven with tilted clay from making Uyghur naan, and tracking down the special equipment to roast the whole lamb.
“Chengbiao is a perfectionist when it comes to authentic taste and true Uyghur food,” says Young. “He spent tons of time to study each and every cooking method and technique, very particular on picking each ingredient, went extra miles to make sure the dishes strictly stick to halal standards and Uyghur authentic taste.” But, she adds, they ran into issues finding some ingredients and had to adjust or modify. “Being a very first Chinese halal Uyghur restaurant in greater Seattle, now we have a mission to accomplish—better serve the underserved halal communities,” says Yang.
It’s a big and admiral goal, but one that still feels like it’s missing a key ingredient. At Wild Cumin, the lack of Uyghur involvement or even recognition is concerning. (Also, per Naf, the lack of tea; “We drink tea with everything!”)
Eating the food of a minority group cooked by someone outside their culture can be a form of appreciating the culture, when done in a way that demonstrates care about the community from which it originates. But, despite the surface nods to Uyghur culture, it would be entirely possible to eat a meal at Wild Cumin and still not know the term Uyghur, much less the plight and persecution of the people. The grilled meat at Wild Cumin is wonderful; it would improve greatly with a dollop of acknowledgment.