How the Bay Area Became a Mecca of Burmese Cuisine

It’s Monday. How the Bay Area grew to become a mecca of Burmese delicacies. Plus, understanding the attract of Montecito.

The line to be seated at Mandalay, a decades-old Burmese restaurant in San Francisco, spilled onto the sidewalk on a latest Saturday night. Inside the festive eating room, clients huddled round rainbow-colored tea leaf salads, spicy noodle soups and flaky parathas served with coconut dip.

A five-minute stroll away, extra would-be diners waited within the night chill for a desk at Burma Superstar, one other in style restaurant serving a protracted menu of dishes from Myanmar, previously referred to as Burma.

More than 10 eateries within the metropolis focus on Burmese meals, at the very least by my rely. In the bigger Bay Area, there are dozens.

I used to be shocked to find this. I lately moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles, the place I nearly by no means encountered Burmese meals. The delicacies is a standby of the Bay Area’s culinary scene, with dishes like samusa soup and mohinga, a catfish stew, built-in into the area’s gastronomic vernacular.

So I used to be curious: How did this occur?

Mandalay arrange store six months later, in the summertime of 1984, on a quiet stretch of California Street within the Inner Richmond neighborhood of San Francisco, an Asian American neighborhood generally referred to as town’s second Chinatown.

“They wanted to introduce Burmese food to America,” Kevin Chen stated of his members of the family who opened Mandalay. Chen took over the institution, now the longest-operating Burmese restaurant within the Bay Area, from his uncle in 2003. “They started with a lot of difficulty — Americans didn’t know what Burmese food was.”

A wave of Burmese immigrants got here to the United States after a 1962 navy takeover of Burma’s authorities, after which once more after a nationwide rebellion in 1988. By 1990, practically two-thirds of U.S. immigrants from Myanmar lived in California, Jeanne Batalova, a senior coverage analyst on the Migration Policy Institute, stated.

Opening eating places permits new immigrants to make a residing, champion the meals of their dwelling nation and create jobs for others from their group, she stated. “It’s a very typical thing that immigrants often do,” she informed me.

Sipping a cup of jasmine tea underneath purple and inexperienced parasols hung from the ceiling of his restaurant’s eating room, Chen informed me that Burmese meals was one thing of an amalgam of the flavors of India, Thailand and China, all of which border Myanmar. Many Americans are extra acquainted with these cuisines, which offered an entry level for San Franciscans. Early reviewers of Nan Yang and Mandalay relied on such touchstones to clarify the eating places’ stews and salads — and to assist each eating places appeal to legions of devotees.

“Without question, this is the best Burmese food I’ve ever eaten,” Bea Pixa wrote in The San Francisco Examiner in August 1984. “Honesty compels me to add that it’s also the first Burmese dinner I’ve ever eaten.”

But the success of some Burmese eating places within the Eighties doesn’t totally clarify what’s occurring now. According to Batalova, California’s Burmese immigrants are break up about evenly between the Los Angeles area and the Bay Area. But so many extra Burmese eating places function within the Bay Area.

For this closing piece of the puzzle, we most likely must thank Burma Superstar.

The restaurant, on Clement Street in Inner Richmond, opened in 1992 however grew to become a viral success after Joycelyn Lee purchased it in 2000 along with her husband on the time. Lee informed me that when her household assumed possession, Burmese meals nonetheless felt like an uncomfortable novelty to many Americans. So she rebranded the dishes, pumped up the promoting, labored to draw American palates and sensibilities and spawned a brand new era of Burmese eating places within the Bay. Burma Superstar itself now has a number of spinoffs.

Without Burma Superstar, “I don’t believe we would have reached this level of popularity of Burmese food in the Bay Area,” Dennis Lin, who owns the close by Burmese Kitchen, informed The Infatuation. “All of our success goes back to what they were doing in the beginning.”

Chen additionally offers credit score to Burma Superstar. But his restaurant retains its personal longtime followers.

Many of Mandalay’s clients have moved to different elements of California, or to neighboring states, he informed me. But once they go to household within the Bay Area, they at all times cease by Mandalay to have tea leaf salad or coconut rooster noodles. Burmese eating places usually don’t exist of their new cities, he stated.

They all inform him: “We miss your food.”

For extra:

• A information to consuming Burmese within the Bay, from Eater San Francisco.

• The San Francisco Chronicle’s information to the Bay Area’s greatest Burmese eating places.

Where we’re touring

Today’s tip comes from Neil Brown, who lives in Altadena. Neil recommends visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: “The (amazing!) Diego Rivera mural from the San Francisco Art Institute is on display at SFMOMA, and it’s on the ground floor, so no admission fee required!”

Tell us about your favourite locations to go to in California. Email your ideas to CAtoday@nytimes.com. We’ll be sharing extra in upcoming editions of the e-newsletter.

And earlier than you go, some good news

Marissa Bergmann was visiting New York from San Francisco in May 2021 when she met Retta Abraham. He sat down subsequent to her at a rooftop get together in Brooklyn and began chatting.

They turned out to have loads in widespread. Their moms are each of Japanese heritage, and their backgrounds had impressed in them each a imaginative and prescient of their future selves: to be surrounded by youngsters and grandchildren.

Marissa, now 33, stated that Retta, now 40, paused and reached out his hand: “Like in an old movie, he was like, ‘Do you want to fall in love?’” she stated. “I wanted to say, ‘Yes, let’s do it,’ but I had to be cool, so I asked if we could dance first.”

They danced, and this month, they married.

Read their love story in The Times.

Thanks for studying. I’ll be again tomorrow. — Soumya

P.S. Here’s as we speak’s Mini Crossword.

Briana Scalia contributed to California Today. You can attain the staff at CAtoday@nytimes.com.

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