The Bay Area’s Burmese food boom
By
Jonathan Kauffman
May 8, 2015 Updated: May 8, 2015 2:12pm
Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle
A line of diners wait for Burma Superstar to open for dinner in San Francisco — a far cry from the restaurant’s struggle before owners Joycelyn Lee and Desmond Htunlin took over in 2001.
When Shwe Myanmar opened in downtown San Rafael around Thanksgiving, it didn’t take long for local Yelpers to wax rapturous.
“Burmese food comes to San Rafael — yay!!” wrote Melanie H. Tyrone V. added, “San Rafael finally has a Burmese restaurant! I have been waiting for one to open up around these parts for the past two years!”
A decade ago, it would be hard to imagine this level of excitement for a cuisine that barely registers in New York or Chicago. After quietly sustaining itself in a few local cities for decades, this year Burmese cuisine has taken to the road: To San Rafael. To Corte Madera. To San Ramon, Santa Clara and Millbrae. In December 2014, contributors to the food website Chowhound counted 28 Bay Area Burmese restaurants — and that was a good five or six locations ago.
Since the 1962 coup d’etat that installed a military junta in Burma (Myanmar) led to many Burmese immigrating to the Bay Area, the local Burmese community now numbers in the tens of thousands, one of the largest in the nation.
The boom owes its existence to a few early arrivals who introduced the broader public to Burmese food in the early 1980s, and then to the viral, if unexpected, success of Burma Superstar in the 2000s. California’s Burmese cuisine is so dynamic and fast evolving that the food Melanie H. and Tyrone V. are thrilled to eat may not bear much resemblance to what cooks make in Burma or what some new restaurateurs are preparing.
In short: If you think you know what tea leaf salad tastes like, you haven’t been eating around.
Photo: Amy Osborne / The Chronicle
Generation 1: Nan Yang founder Philip Chu spends his retirement writing and researching two books: “The Story of Food” and an English translation of a Chinese Taoist text.
'Where’s Burma?’
When Philip and Nancy Chu opened Nan Yang in Oakland Chinatown in 1983, it might have been the first full-fledged Burmese restaurant in the Bay Area, if not the West Coast.
“I had people coming peeking through the window, looking at the place,” Philip Chu remembers 32 years later, in his early 80s. “Burma — where’s Burma? Then they walked away. Sometimes I had only one customer all night long.”
Yet Chu felt called to continue cooking the food of his home country — by a lifelong love of beauty, he says. He had grown up in the former capital city of Rangoon, a member of the middle-class Chinese community, and that same love had caused him to reject a scholarship to study nuclear physics in order to pursue architecture.
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His work as an architect, for a member of the junta who was then ousted for his support of democracy, landed Chu in prison for 2½ years. He and his wife and children were allowed to leave Burma in 1969 on two conditions: They could never return, and they had to leave immediately, taking only $7 each with them. “I could not even tip the porter at the San Francisco airport when we arrived,” Chu says.
The Chus were among the scores of Chinese Burmese who trickled into the country in the late 1960s, driven away by anti-Chinese riots and anti-intellectual persecution. Educated people with a skill, explains Myanmar Community USA Director Felix Chin, were readily given visas; others had to find a relative or a sponsor. Anyone with ties to the Bay Area’s Chinese community tapped them. Many new arrivals found support — jobs, English lessons, housing — from Chinatown immigrant groups.
Chu alternated between architecture work and restaurants — one a hofbrau renowned for its roast turkey — before he and Nancy opened Nan Yang. Sharing cooking duties, the two split the menu between Burmese and Chinese dishes. They inspired a friend in the Burmese-Chinese community, Wynn Lee, to open Mandalay in San Francisco’s Richmond District six months later, where he served a similar mix.
Yet both restaurants languished, Chu admits. Despite their resolve, the Chus began to fret that they’d made a mistake. Then, in 1985, San Francisco Chronicle critic Stan Sesser reviewed Nan Yang, gushing over the ginger salad and coconut-chicken noodles. Chu ran out of most dishes by 8 p.m., despite preparing more food than he ever had after Sesser warned him a couple days in advance.
An era of hour-long waits had begun.
Photo: Amy Osborne, The Chronicle
Traditional Burmese tea leaf salad at Mandalay restaurant in San Francisco.
Most of the subsequent writers who came to the restaurant described Burmese food as the midpoint of Chinese, Indian and Thai cuisines, with mild curries, hearty soups and thrilling salads. Chu says that he refused to compromise on his recipes for American tastes. Yet there was one dish he declined to serve, thinking it too off-putting for outsiders, until a food writer who had read about the Burmese practice of fermenting tea leaves in buried containers requested a tea leaf salad.
Chu mixed one up, using leaves imported by a tiny market in Los Angeles and pulses and seeds he painstakingly soaked, roasted and fried. Other customers found out about the dish. Within a few years, tea leaf salad had surpassed ginger salad in popularity.
Nan Yang opened a second location on Rockridge in 1992, closing the original location a few years later and retiring from the restaurant business in 2012. Across the bay, Mandalay sputtered along until 2003, when its original owner sold to a family friend, a more talented cook.
Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle
Generation 2: Burma Superstar co-owner Joycelyn Lee with the restaurant’s tea leaf salad.
Superstar saviors
Around the same time, Burma Superstar’s current owners Joycelyn Lee and partner Desmond Htunlin got into the restaurant business because they couldn’t imagine parting with their favorite place.
Languishing on a slow block of Clement Street, Burma Superstar was not much to look at in 2001, with beer signs for atmosphere, a dining room gazebo consumed by plastic ivy and a near-perennially empty dining room. The owners had opened the restaurant in 1992, but nine years in, they were exhausted and ready to sell.
Htunlin is Burmese-Chinese and Lee is Filipino-Chinese, so the two regular customers, then in their late 20s, were well acquainted with the cuisine. Lee says she remembers thinking. “If they close, where would we eat Burmese food? Burmese food is a lot of work.”
Their decision to sustain the restaurant — one of the owners stayed on as a waiter — took on new urgency one month later when Lee lost her graphic design job in the dot-com crash. Suddenly, she realized, “I have a lot of people working in the kitchen, and how are we going to pay them? So I started to do anything and everything to help it grow.”
Htunlin and Lee gradually took down the beer signs and replaced them with photographs. They removed the gazebo and the ugly wood paneling. They touched up the menu based on suggestions from the Burma-born cooks and waiters. There was a cold noodle dish, for instance, with 20 ingredients that Lee loved, but in Burmese it was called hand salad, and hand salad wasn’t going on the menu. So she renamed it Rainbow Salad, and the dish suddenly sold like crazy.
Lee can’t point to a moment when she felt assured of Burma Superstar’s success, but somewhere, around 2005, the jostling in the dining room spilled onto the sidewalk. Local publications began touting the restaurant’s vegetarian samusa soup — a popular street food in Burma, Lee says — and customers couldn’t get enough of the coconut rice and the tea leaf salad, now made with added romaine lettuce for a lighter crunch.
In 2007, Htunlin and Lee took over a friend’s flailing Alameda restaurant and turned it into a second Burma Superstar, then opened a third branch in Temescal in 2009.
Burma Superstar had become a phenomenon.
Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle
Server Katharine Camilli (right) mixes tea leaf salad for Maximo Botello (left) from Orange County at B Star Bar in San Francisco, California, on Friday, May 1, 2015.
Setting the pace
In the wake of the phenomenon came Rangoon Rubys and Burma Houses and Pagans. Overflow from the Burma Superstar lines even helped transform the pace at nearby Mandalay from sleepy to manic.
Lee attributes today’s Burmese boom to changing tastes. “I think, in general, people are more interested in trying something new,” she says. “What’s new to them is traditional to Burma. You can bring on the fish sauce, bring on the shrimp paste. People are open to trying other people’s cuisines.”
Yet, as Burmese cuisine has settled into its new country, it has changed. How could it not? The vegetables sold at market are different. The Pacific Ocean yields different fish than Southeast Asian rivers.
The context in which we eat the food is different, too. Burma’s national dish, a pounded-fish stew called mohinga, is ladled into bowls at street corner stalls at all hours of the day; on Bay Area menus, it takes a demure place in the soup section. Here, curries aren’t set on the table with a profusion of bowls: rice, soup, raw and lightly cooked vegetables, pickles and relishes.
Most important, who eats the food is different.
“Real Burmese food,” says Myanmar Community USA Director Chin, “they use fish sauce a lot. But not many people can stand the smell. So they have to use it a little bit lighter, so non-Burmese people will come and eat it.”
There’s also a similarity between newer restaurants’ menus and Burma Superstar’s. You can see it at Shwe Myanmar in San Rafael, whose menu — rainbow salad, samusa soup and all — emulates the more established restaurant’s with the fierce devotion of a drag queen to her Beyonce cover.
Burmese food is becoming Burmese American food, just as what Americans consider Thai and Indian food congealed several decades before: a short canon of dishes popularized by early restaurants like Nan Yang, Mandalay and Burma Superstar, interspersed with Chinese American and Thai dishes. The prepackaged tea leaf salad you now find at grocery stores is a lettuce salad lightly flecked with dark green.
Who emigrates from Burma to America has changed as well. Given the ruling regime’s repression of the many ethnic groups — Karen, Shan, Chin, Kachin, Mon — the U.S. government has granted asylum to 150,000 new refugees since 2001, many of whom have settled across the country. Northern California-bound immigrants find housing in Oakland or Union City instead of San Francisco. Instead of working on farms and in workshops in Burma, here they can become cooks and servers.
Photo: Amy Osborne, The Chronicle
Generation 3: (Left to Right) Wanna-E owners Zin Win, Rainy Shai, Coco Lee, and William Lee.
Free to experiment
We are entering a new phase: Bay Area diners have embraced Burmese food so enthusiastically that they have freed some restaurateurs to experiment.
William Lue exemplifies both aspects of the rush. After spending the 1970s and ’80s in Chinese and Burmese restaurants, Lue left the industry until 2012, when he launched a short-lived Burmese food truck that circulated in SoMa. A string of pop-ups and half-baked restaurants followed. Then Lue settled on an empire-building strategy: taking Burmese to the ’burbs.
Tapping into the flow of immigrant cooks to the East Bay, Lue opened the Refined Palate in Orinda in December 2013, TW Burmese Gourmet in San Ramon in May 2014, Grocery Cafe in East Oakland in March 2015 and Pacheco Bistro in Martinez three weeks ago.
All fit the designation “hole in the wall”: sparsely decorated restaurants in central but far from high-profile locations, each with a short introductory menu of classics like tea and ginger salads, mohinga, coconut-chicken noodles, and a few curries.
Lue, a man with so many plans that it’s hard to separate the ideal from reality, has even grander ambitions. He’s hoping to have Hmong farmers in Fresno grow Burmese vegetables like moringa (“drumstick tree”) and chinbong, the “sour leaf” that some restaurants stir-fry with shrimp, and to introduce the East Bay to rare Shan and Karen dishes. His cooks are already preparing rarities for groups who request them in advance, and Lue says he produces fermented fish paste, spicy dried anchovies and other fragrant condiments for customers who ask for “Burmese Burmese” food.
Photo: Amy Osborne / The Chronicle
Wanna-E food truck in San Francisco.
Lue isn’t alone. Some of the most distinctive Burmese food in San Francisco is coming from Wanna-E, a food truck that became street-legal just two months ago.
Wanna-E is run by a group of Burmese-Chinese friends in their 20s who arrived in the Bay Area in the mid-2000s. Manager William Lee and his sister, Coco, a recent culinary-school grad, teamed up with Zin Win and Rainy Shai because they wanted to introduce the food of Mandalay, the city where all four spent their early years.
“Mandalay is really diverse,” William Lee says. “A lot of immigrants have come there from China and Thailand, and our cuisine has already been shaped by this diverse culture.”
The four winnowed down their initial list of 50 dishes — all of which they hold in reserve for their restaurant, should they ever open one — down to a menu of 10 mobile-friendly offerings. It includes Chinese-Burmese noodles with braised pork and scads of fried garlic, and a Yunnanese mushroom noodle soup. A salad of crispy shredded pork with cabbage and lime is a dish the Lees’ grandmother concocted years ago.
Even their classics taste more vivid than the versions we’ve come to expect: Tea leaf salad thrums with the funk of squid sauce, and crisp-edged squares of split-pea “tofu” come with a tart, chile-laced tamarind dipping sauce that Lee says is ubiquitous in Mandalay.
“Our customers tell us it’s very different from Burmese dishes at other restaurants,” William Lee says. “That’s a good thing to hear.”
Burma Superstar is not maintaining the status quo, either. When Htunlin opened Burma Love in December, he replaced some of the staples with new dishes. Lee, too, says she has just returned from a Burmese voyage, inspired. New dishes may spin out of her trip, she says, as well as a series of pop-ups to raise money for school uniforms.
She also came home with a more profound sense of her restaurant’s reach after talking with a woman in Burma who runs a cooking school and community center.
Well into their discussion, the woman finally asked Lee where she was traveling from. San Francisco, Lee told her.
“Oh!” the woman exclaimed. “Burma Superstar!”
Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jonkauffman
A guide to Burma by the bay
Here’s an opinionated, incomplete and highly personal guide to some of my favorite Burmese dishes from local restaurants.
Mandalay: 4348 California St., San Francisco; (415) 386-3895.
www.mandalaysf.com. Lunch and dinner daily.
Pick the Burmese dishes out from the sugary Chinese American ones, and you will eat well: lettuce-free tea leaf salad, ginger salad, Mandalay special noodles (noodles with coconut, chicken and lime), kaw soi dok (cold noodles with fried shallots and tamarind dressing).
Burma Superstar: 309 Clement St., San Francisco; (415) 387-2147.
www.burmasuperstar.com. Lunch and dinner daily.
Samusa soup, rainbow salad, okra egg curry, platha with curry.
Wanna-E: Thisfood truck is often parked during lunchtime at the corner of Third and Harrison streets in San Francisco. Check
www.wanna-e.com or
Wanna-E (@WannaESF) | Twitter for locations.
Split-pea tofu, tea leaf salad, pork sung salad, chicken curry with coconut rice.
Little Yangon: 6318 Mission St., Daly City; (650) 994-0111.
http://littleyangon.com. Lunch and dinner Monday, Wednesday-Friday; breakfast through dinner Saturday-Sunday.
Mohinga (fish-noodle soup), Indo-Burmese biryani and, if you’re inclined toward strong flavors, belachang (fried ground shrimp and chiles). One of the few Bay Area restaurants that does not stint on shrimp paste and fish sauce.
Grocery Cafe: 2248 10th Ave., Oakland; (925) 566-4877.
www.facebook.com/grocerycafe. Lunch and dinner Monday-Saturday.
Mohinga (fish-noodle soup), ginger salad, braised pork with pickled mango, and whatever daily specials that William Lue is testing out on customers.
Mingalaba: 1213 Burlingame Ave., Burlingame; (650) 343-3228.
www.mingalabarestaurant.com. Lunch and dinner daily.
Mingalaba is owned by the same family behind Mandalay, and the menu is similar. Food Editor Miriam Morgan, a regular customer, recommends ong noh kaw soi (coconut milk chicken soup), tea leaf salad, pan-fried okra prawns and house special noodles (with coconut, split peas and lime leaf).
Pakistan going to send back the Burmese and Bengalis back.
wrong person.. bro..!! u should ask to ur Gov..
they willing to go back with Afghans to Afghanistan ?
may be.. bro.. !!
