Central East Asian Cuisine 印象新疆

My experience is pretty good here. The food portion is big. We ordered the xinjiang big chicken plate. My husband and I ate it for three meals. Highly recommend the lamb skewers! I like the part that their skewers has fat in the middle which makes skewers even better. Also the cold spice chicken also tastes really good, the numbness is great, though maybe a bit too sweet. In general we love the food we get and we will definitely be back and try fried noodles that we did not get the chance to order.

Went to checkout this newly opened Xinjiang restaurant a couple months ago. It was such an disappointment. 新疆椒麻鸡/Spices Chicken with Green Sichuan Pepper was overloaded with spices in a bad way, and the chicken tasted like plastic sealed souvenir food you can buy at tourist attractions back in China. 新疆缸子肉/Mutton Soup tased ok but it was covered by like an inch of oil, could not remember how did I even tasted it. 新疆炒米粉/Egg Fried Rice Noodle, the waiter warned me it’s extremely spicy, but it came not spicy at all, and the meat in it did not taste like fresh. 火焰山架子肉/Tandoor Lamb, is it a joke? It was not even eatable, 70% of the meat were pure fat, I was having a had time to understand how could they even serve this dish. The worst of my 2024 first half of year restaurants.

This restaurant was a very pleasant surprise. Chicaho’s Chinatown has changed enormously since the days before the pandemic, and this is one of the new restaurants that has cropped up in the past months. I should start by saying most customers were Asian, which is usually a good indicator that the food is authentic, good and not very pricey. And it was all of the above! If you have never has Western Chinese food, it is a completely different experience and taste profile. Lamb features prominently, and the flavor profile is interesting and fresh. We ate like kings. I particularly recommend the fried cabbage and the fried tofu cold salad (not sure what the name was exactly but that’s a faithful description).

We keep coming back and their food always beats our expectations. We’ve referred this place to many friends and everyone enjoys it. Keep up the great food!

It’s a bit out of the way towards the end of the old Chinatown strip, and I was also a bit hesitant to try because of the lower google rating especially since there are so many other restaurants around, but I’m glad we tried it. I’ll definitely be back! Clean, modern decor with authentic Xinjiang flavors. Super reasonably priced, it was understaffed when we came but the only server was friendly and helpful. The big plate chicken was huge, even the smaller, 2-person portion I felt could easily be shared among 3 or 4 if you’re ordering other dishes. And you should definitely order other dishes! The made-to-order baked bao and skewers are both great as well. The only thing to note is that a lot of items take a bit of time to come out because they’re made fresh. I didn’t really mind because the quality of the food was really good. Hope this place thrives!