eating in Myanmar

[skunkbunny]

Hi all,

I'm heading to Myanmar/Burma for about a month (Rangoon, Mandalay, Bagan, Hsipaw, and a few other places) with family members towards the end of Feb/06 and was wondering if anyone had any favourites or experiences they could share... looking forward to tea-leaf salad and mohinga

Thanks

Michael

[Austin]

Hi,

You've already mentioned two of the biggest highlights: pickled tea leaf salad (lephet thoke) is wonderful, but it's hard for foreigners not be put off by the fact that the vendors use their ungloved hands to squish all the ingredients up! And mohinghya is wonderful, wonderful stuff. Be sure to crumble lots of deep-fried peanut crackers into it! I know an excellent mohinga shop in Yangon, but will have to do some research in order to tell you exactly where it is.

Other highlights include dan bauk, Myanmar Briyani. I like the stuff at the Yuzana shop in Yangon, which includes a delicious sour soup side dish. Burmese teashops, especially in Yangon, are lots of fun. The tea is tasty, and the snacks can be very very good at times, but the sanitary standards in these places can be quite low, even for Myanmar! I still recall enjoying some delicious semolina cakes in a Yangon teashop, and ordering seconds, only to see the owner spraying a generous amount of bug spray into the sealed sweets display case!

In general, Myanmar food is very, very oily. I enjoyed most of what I ate, and found the country to be a unique culinary experience, but was looking forward to some good old-fashioned Thai food towards the end of my trip!

Austin

[Schneier]

Wow, Myanmar for a month. Do you have any hope of Internet connectivity while you're there?

[skunkbunny]

Wow, Myanmar for a month.  Do you have any hope of Internet connectivity while you're there?

←

Just got back from the month long trip. Internet was available in Yangon although it was slow and the guy had to show us some hacks to get around the censorship. Mandalay internet frustrated us so much that we just abandoned the cause until we got back to Bangkok. Most people at the Internet cafes just do Google Chat (google has a Burmese language site believe it or not) and there doesn't appear to be much emailing.

As Austin said, the food was unique but very greasy. Shan food and South Indian were some good breaks but not that common.

The lephet salad was nice and quite potent. Mohinga was good but had nothing on the Oo No Kyauk Swe, breakfast noodles with a chicken and coconut milk gravy and some onion bhajia like garnishes. It was a bit hard to find but well worth it, and either way anything was better than Burmese Guesthouse Breakfast... Eeeeeek, I shudder at the thought of that horrible margarine and crap white bread toast.

I too am happy to be back in Bangkok and have some ungreased vegetables and herbs.

I'm writing up some stuff. Will have a link within a day or two with some reviews and pics.

Thanks again Austin for the reccomendation.

[Austin]

No problem! How long will you be in BKK? PM or email me if you'd like to meet up for some eats.

Austin

[skunkbunny]

Here's a bit of the food from Myanmar.

www.trippinmag.com/pages/mainNav/food.html