Burmese Cuisine

We had some of the tastiest food of our travels in Myanmar.

Breakfast

We tried two traditional breakfast dishes, Mohinga which is a fish soup, and Shan noodles which can be found in the Shan region around Inle Lake.

I struggled a bit with mohinga, as I’m not a fan of fish in the mornings. I think if we’d had it for lunch, it would have been better.

Shan noodles on the other hand were delicious. They were like a chicken curry soup with noodles, a bit like Vietnamese pho but with a much richer sauce. They were also really filling and set you up well for the day.

For lunch and dinner, the main options are salads and curries (or both!).

Salads

We had some delightful salads here. The most unusual was the tea leaf salad. Tea leaves can either be a bit sour or a bit spicy, but both options were equally delicious. We also had some fantastic tomato salads, which were quite sweet. We hope to recreate these at home but worry that the tomatoes just won’t be as good quality! We also had an avocado salad and a ginger salad, as shown below.

Curries

Regardless of the type of curry, they all start from the same base of onion, garlic, ginger and turmeric. They also use paprika, but only hot paprika, as they don’t have sweet paprika in Myanmar.

Burmese curries are not particularly spicy, but they are very flavourful and always come with a side of soup, normally chicken flavoured. Some examples of curries we had include chicken with potato, pumpkin, eggplant and peanut.

Deep fried

Essentially, with Myanmar cooking, if it’s not served raw, it’ll be deep fried! We had some really tasty desserts, including deep fried banana, and some fab snacks, like deep fried samosa, bhaji and doughnuts. Basically, we discovered that everything tasted good if it’s deep fried!

Yangon

In Yangon, we had a different culinary experience, but it was equally tasty. The Rangoon Tea House did delicious chocolate filled samosas and bbq pork bao, while Gekko across the road did some fantastic sushi. This was a really good eating day!

We also had some great stick food from 19th Street, such a staple of the South East Asian dining experience.

I was really surprised by Myanmar, as I had little knowledge of the food before I arrived. My slight concern is the use of MSG, although many tourist places are quick to point out that they don’t use it in their cooking. I’m therefore content to accept that the food simply was that good!