About Ailizati Polo Restaurant
Ailizati Polo Restaurant near the Grand Bazaar serves outstanding polo, with one serving costing ¥25 and rice refills coming free. The kitchen is the city's most-cited single polo destination — a small family-run kitchen with the rice-and-lamb pilaf as the central single dish, prepared in large communal cast-iron kazan pots cooked over slow fire and served as continuous portions throughout the lunch and dinner services.
The signature is the Standard Uyghur Polo at ¥25 — a portion of saffron-tinted rice with bone-in lamb chunks, julienned carrots (the Kashgar-style red-and-yellow carrot mix), caramelised onions, raisins, chickpeas, and the regional Uyghur spice blend (cumin, coriander, dried Sichuan peppercorn). The portion is generous and the rice refills are free — most regulars eat one main portion and one or two refills. The premium Polo with extra lamb runs ¥40.
Beyond polo, the kitchen serves a small Uyghur side-dish menu — Salad with the Uyghur-style chopped tomato-cucumber-onion (¥10), Pickled vegetables (¥5), Yoghurt drink (¥8), Naan bread (¥3 per piece). Most diners order polo-and-bread-and-tea for lunch and the bill rarely exceeds ¥40 per person.
The room is functional Uyghur-restaurant style. Forty seats across a single ground-floor open dining hall with low communal tables, white-tiled walls, the open kitchen and the kazan pots visible at the front of the shop, fluorescent lighting. Walk-ins outside the 12-2pm lunch peak (the genuine Kashgar peak meal hour) work; the queue at peak runs ten to twenty minutes. Cash is preferred but cards are accepted; English picture menus are present.
Best Occasion Fit
Solo dining at its purest — communal-table seat, twenty-minute lunch, ¥25 bill, the city's reference polo at its source. For team dinners with food-curious colleagues, the cheap-eat format absorbs four to eight without complaint. As a first date with travel-curious partners, the unfamiliar Uyghur polo and the local-frequented atmosphere give the meal a built-in narrative.
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