Myanmar Curry restaurant

This is one of the nicer traditional curry restaurants in Myanmar. It was indoors, air conditioned and tasty. If you read my Myanmar Curry recipe post you'll know that even though Myanmar is sandwiched between India and Thailand, their curries are significantly less spiced then either of their neighbors; primarily being flavored with onions, ginger, garlic, turmeric and fish sauce. Compare that with Indian curries with dozens of ingredients and you know we are dealing with a different beast here. But there are other schools of thought on haute cuisine. 

Italian food should be made with only 3-5 ingredients in a dish, the idea being, simplicity can be elegance. This is the direction which Myanmar curry should be headed in.

At these restaurants, generally you order a curry or two and it comes with a couple of side vegetables/salads and a bowl of vegetable broth. 

 

This is pork curry, you can see how it sits in a pool of oil. The meat itself is well flavored but it was served cold in this bustling lunchtime spot. I was surprised by this. This curry was made with pork belly, which gave the meat a great softness and the incredible richness that only pork belly can.

This is chicken curry, flavored with the same spice mix as the pork, it didn't stand out particularly. It was also heavily oiled, but the pieces of chicken were wing sections, which are one of my favorite pieces of the chicken, a lot of bone for flavor, but a nice clean white meat. The curry paste was thickly coating the surface which gave it a strong flavor.

This is the fish curry which was probably my favorite. I think there might have been just a little tomato used in the base of the curry, there was a lot less standing oil and the flavors of the curry complimented the fish perfectly. The sweet/sour twang from the tomatoes really brought some umph to this dish. 

This was accompanied by various salads, condiments and the accouterments of the meal, hot chilies, fresh garlic, fried onions and several different dressed leafy greens. The salads were reminiscent of Thai salads, but not blisteringly spicy or sour. They were tasty, simple, and accented the heavy and oily meats well

Finally, you can't forget dessert! This is a bowl of palm sugar mixed with water to make an interesting simple syrup. They float little jelly like noodles in it and keep the whole thing cold with a piece of ice. 

Overall this was an interesting meal and I had a really great time talking about all of the food. The translations were not always perfect, but the kitchen seemed fine to send out random uncooked ingredients to help explain what things are!

 

Here is a bowl of Palm sugar. It make's a tasty little bite if you have no idea what you're doing :)

-NOM!