NADI Myanmar Cafe

The day's sunny skies were a far cry from the previous night...

where it rained nonstop and then some! En route to Alhambra...

Little Yangon

Dinner that night would be with a former student (class of 2000)...

I knew she liked Burmese food and since both of us hadn't been here before, Little Yangon was our dinner destination that evening...

Return to Daw Yee Myanmar Cafe

After having had our snacks at 101 Noodle Express, it was time for the "real meal"!

D requested somewhere with rice...

Daw Yee Myanmar Cafe

While it might have seemed we were eating all morning, we only really had a few bites of a pastry and some caffeine laced drinks. It was time for some actual food now...

I remember reading about this place on the Gastronomer's blog (post linked at the end) and made sure to put this in our "to try" list...

The restaurant is not on the main drag, but on a small residential side street. Even better with easy parking right in front for us...

Burma Superstar

We were going to dinner with one of my former students (MFS c/o 2000) and her BF. She is a musician and is in a band (plays bass, keyboards, guitar and sings). I can't believe she's nearing her 30's!

I'd been wanting to try Burma Superstar since reading about it on Wandering Chopstick's blog...

Return to Yoma Myanmar

[Original visit was last month]

After Palm Sunday mass at a church in Alhambra, we headed over to Yoma Myanmar in Monterey Park for some Burmese food...

Here's my original post on Yoma two months ago...

The last time we went, it was dinner time. It wasn't too crowded when we got there around 12:30 pm.

I'd been thinking about, no, make that DREAMING about the Burmese Tea Leaf Salad...

Here's that black velveteen banner that I mentioned last time (which was also referenced by a yelper about the "fine ladies" of Myanmar wall hanging)...I had to wait til the lady who was sitting next to it bent down so I wouldn't get her in the shot!

The salad offerings on their menu...Look at the name of that one, "Hydrocotileasistica". I just tried looking it up on wikepedia. Apparently, it should be spelled as "Hydrocotil Asiatica". The leaves are used as a leafy green in India, as a medicinal herb in Asia and Africa. It is considered quite nutritious. We'll have to try that next time...

My Thai iced tea...

This is what we came for, the Mohinga, which is the national dish of Burma (now called Myanmar). It is traditionally eaten during breakfast. 

According to the wikipedia entry on Mohinga:

"The main ingredients of mohinga are chickpea flour and/or crushed toasted rice, garlic, onions, lemongrass, banana tree stem, ginger, fish paste, fish sauce and catfish in a rich broth cooked and kept on the boil in a cauldron. It is served with rice vermicelli, dressed and garnished with fish sauce, a squeeze of lime, crispfried onions, coriander, spring onions, crushed dried chilli and, as optional extras, crispy fried fritters such as split chickpeas (pè gyan gyaw), urad dal (baya gyaw) or gourd (bu gyaw) as well as boiled egg and fried fish cake (nga hpè gyaw)."

The Mohinga had really good flavor. The broth itself looked to be quite spicy, but it wasn't. There were yellow beans (to be seen later in the fried rice dish) and sliced fish cake. I thought that there would be actual chunks or bits of real fish but it was fish cake which has a kind of spongy consistency. Hidden were the noodles and a sliced boiled egg.

This portion could have fed 3-4 people as an appetizer. Bert and I had a really light breakfast so we could have a more substantial lunch. There were also crunchy bits of "something" in the soup. Our server couldn't explain what it was in English to me. She didn't really understand what I was asking, so I gave up. The woman who helped us before and explained the dishes and ingredients wasn't working there that day. I suspect the crunchy bits were probably beans.

Here is that Tea Leaf Salad we loved so much. It had so much layers of flavor andwonderful texture. The tea leaves are fermented and served with chopped tomatoes, peanuts, broad beans, thinly sliced cabbage, and some other type of bean (very small, kind of like a lentil, but crunchy). The dressing was lemon juice (which was also a "condiment" on the table").  The salad was sweet, sour, salty, earthy, and crunchy all at once.

In addition to the Mohinga (spelled as "Mont Hinn Ga"), here were the other items on the breakfast menu:

This was the Steam Bean Fried Rice. The beans are "Vatana" beans which are small and yellow. The rice was served with a fried egg on top and crispy fried shallots. We loved this the first time so we got it again.

The dishes came served with a relish of sliced cabbage and red onion which we topped off with hot sauce.

Specials sign:

The old fashioned tile in their bathroom...

The condiments included fish sauce (in the soy sauce bottle) and lemon juice...

It was a great revisit to a cuisine we rarely see in San Diego...

Next up...(and out of order), Hwa Ro Korean BBQ and some random travel pix. After lunch, we headed down to Aliso Viejo to pick up TC at her cousins' house.

Yoma Myanmar

[ Wait what? Only 2 new posts!]

Last weekend, Bert, TC and I took a road trip to LA. After our practically free day at Universal Studios and experiencing the extreme fuckery known as LA traffic, we headed over at a snail's pace to our hotel in Pasadena to briefly check in, drop off our luggage and head out again for dinner. By this time, it was already 7:45 pm. We left Universal at 5 pm. Yeah...

 Our original plan was to stop by The Oinkster in Eagle Rock for one of their ube shakes but that was not to be. Prior to our trip, I searched the web to see what other cuisines were out there that we, as a family, haven't explored yet...Lo and behold...Yoma Myanmar. Although it says "Thai", there weren't too many Thai offerings on the menu...

Here's a few mentions of Yoma on yelp  and here from the LA Times. The website on their take out menu is apparently not in service (http://www.yoma-burmesefood.com/). Yoma is in Monterey Park in the San Gabriel Valley. There are tons of Chinese restaurants there, but hey, we were here for Burmese food. We were majorly hungry, having brought our own lunches to Universal...we hadn't eaten since noon. 

I was quite curious about Burmese cuisine, never having had it before. I don't think there are any Burmese places in San Diego. The owner of Yoma said the only other Burmese place in Southern California was Golden Triangle in Whittier.  More on Burmese cuisine here.

When we arrived, a family of four had just finished eating. There was a couple in the corner, then another lady came in. Most of them spoke in their native language to the owner (I assume it was Burmese). That right there, was a good sign. The restaurant is pretty small, seating maybe 25 or 30 at the most. We sat by the corner near a TV. Nearby lay Burmese newspapers and a Burmese DVD. There was one wall hanging that I regret not taking a photograph of - it was a black velevet decoration that said, "Beautiful Ladies of Myanmar". There was an outline of the country and dotted all over the map were glittery dayglo renderings of these women. A yelper actually wrote about that in her review.

The owner greeted and and handed us, I kid you not, five different menus. Some of them only had a few pictures on each page, like this one. I think they need to streamlime their menus! The chayote with egg looked pretty good, but we dind't order that.

Sorry this one is a bit blurry but if you look at the upper left hand corner, that particular item caught our eye. We were actually going to order something else, but decided to go for the Burmese tea leaf salad which is not something we see too often in San Diego.

Here's another page from one of their many menus...curries.

I totally dig the Burmese writing - it's so pretty...

and here is another page from the menu. Look at #84...the Burmese boiling bean fried rice. We ended up getting that, as you shall soon see.

This was a flyer underneath the glass table top. I found out later that Mohinga is the national dish of Burma. Had I known that, we would have ordered it as well. Mohinga is a fish soup withthin rice noodles.

Okay, here goes. This was the Burmese Tea leaf Salad which we all really loved. It had fermented tea leaves, chopped tomatoes, peanuts, broad beans, thinly sliced cabbage, and some other type of bean (very small, kind of like a lentil, but crunchy) and flavored with lemon juice. The taste was amazingly complex. There was sweet, sour, salty, earthy, and crunchy all at once. The textures were also great - coming from all of the beans in there.

Close up of tea leaf salad:

One of our appetizers was the Samusas with tamarind sauce. The wrapper for their samusa, unlike the Indian samosa or the Ethiopian sambussa, was very thin, flaky,  and light. The filling was mashed potatoes with onions, and peas. The dipping sauce was also quite tasty - if you like the sweet and sour quality of tamarind, brightened with cilantro leaves.

This was the Burmese Bean Fried Rice which had onions and a fried egg on top. The beans (which I looked up on the web) are known as Vatana beans. I thought it was kind of different having beans WITH rice. The owner said this is a traditional breakfast dish eaten with bread (wow, three starches!).

Can you tell that we were trying to sample the different Burmese specialties? This dish below, the Burmese stir fried noodles was the only disappointment of the night. The noodles were mixed with broccoli,  carrots, green onions, and shrimp (our protein of choice). The sauce was nonexistent, so there wasn't too much flavor there. Our daughter, on the other hand, enjoyed this. She actually liked everything we ordered but liked the noodles the most.

Now this was the Burmese Fried Dried Beef (appetizer) - You can see slivers of ginger in there. The beef was fried to a crisp and the shreds were so tasty, aromatic with the flavors of ginger and garlic. We ended up taking the leftovers, which, by the way, are still quite crisp! I bet this would taste awesome with fried rice!

Here's another view of that beef...

We had a nice chat with the owner who seemed genuinely happy to see us trying her cuisine. She even asked us point blank why we chose her restaurant and what we thought of her food. She was quite helpful when describing the dishes and answering my questions about several of the ingredients. By the evening's end, the restaurant had gotten full again. The woman came and went several times to drop off our dishes, to check on us, and answer questions. The service, while slow at times, was friendly. The dessert you see below was on the house. The lady brought us a plate of gelatin topped with coconut cream. The gelatin was flavored with coconut milk and was quite firm. Maybe this was given to every customer? In any case, it was a nice gesture on her part.

The next day would be filled with lots to see and do and most importantly, EAT!  First thing tomorrow, we would watch the first installment of the Rick Riordan bestseller, "Percy Jackson and the Olympians - The Lightning Thief". This series has now dethroned Harry Potter in TC's library. There are five books in the series and this movie will be the first in the franchise. Bert and I frantically read the book prior to our trip (I finished it the morning of watching the movie!) so we could discuss the similarities and differences with TC. 

By the way, it's Sunday right now and it's raining. The BAFTA's are on BBCAmerica and RPattz has a stray lock of hair that looks quite hideous on his forehead. He's also sporting 1890's sideburns since he is currently filming, "Bel Ami" in London. More on that later. Bel Ami deserves its own post. Let's put it this way, that film BETTER be rated R. His character in the book, in addition to scheming his way to the top in his quest for money and power, bangs everyone and their mother in that movie! And of course I can't wait to see it!