The Burma Chronicles

If you consider yourself an Asian street-food aficionado, book yourself a culinary expedition to BURMA. Fill your wallet with kyat (a little goes a long way) and fly to Yangon to sample mild, rich curries, dosa-like “gangster snacks” and the samoosa salad of your dreams

- Richard Holmes

Her hands worked as quickly as the traffic speeding past my plastic stool on the pavement. Snip-snip-snip, and the cubes of samoosa, crisp and golden from the bubbling oil, dropped into the colourful plastic bowl. On top went a scattering of fried chickpeas. Next, a spoonful of fried shallots, a sprinkle of grated cabbage and a few slices of turmeric-stained potatoes. A flick of the wrist to mix it all and the dish was done. A samoosa salad to remember.

This wasn’t in one of the city’s buzzing noodle bars or charming tea shops. Rather, a makeshift kitchen on Merchant Road; one of the innumerable anonymous food stalls that sprout on almost every street corner in downtown Yangon.

Here, charmingly faded colonial buildings line wide streets where fruit-sellers tout fresh strawberries, bananas and dubiously pungent durian. Green mango is sliced and dipped in packets of salt and chilli powder, while at a street cart quail eggs are deep fried in rice-flour batter and topped with sprinklings of spring onion. An assault of aromas, but where to begin?

A good place to start, I discover, is the Rangoon Tea House (RTH). Tea houses are common across Myanmar; a relic of the country’s days as a British colony when Indian clerks and workers were brought across the Bay of Bengal to help run the empire.

“Tea shops have always been a social space, like the British pub. Our menu is inspired by the tea houses across Myanmar, and although the space is modern, the food is traditional,” explains co-owner Htet Myet Oo.

Myanmar-born, but raised in England, Htet returned to Yangon four years ago, inspired by the British chefs who were redefining British cooking. The menu at RTH attempts to do the same for Burmese food, from pea paratha to mohinga.