Burmese Food: A Rare Treat

The first thing you notice about Yoma is the sign in the window reading “Thai Food.” That’s there to attract people who know a lot about pad Thai and mee krob but probably nothing about Yoma’s real specialty, the food of Burma (now called Myanmar).

It’s filling a real gap. Until Yoma opened in Monterey Park a few months ago, there were only three ways to get Burmese food around here: Make Burmese friends, attend Buddhist temple events involving home-cooked food, or go to the Golden Triangle in Whittier.

Yoma, which took over a site formerly occupied by a Thai restaurant, has separate menus and separate cooks for each cuisine. The Thai dishes may serve as a safety net, but they’re good in their own right.

The Burmese food, though, is fascinating. Myanmar ginger salad combines fine shreds of ginger root with dried garlic, beans, shallots, sesame seeds, peanuts and onion, providing a wealth of tastes and contrasting textures.

Opo is a mild green squash with white flesh. Cut into sticks, dipped in sturdy batter and deep fried until brown and crisp, it comes to the table sizzling hot, crunchy yet soft. There’s a spicy sweet-and-sour sauce for dipping, but the subtle flavor of the squash is so pleasant it doesn’t need any help. Fried onion slices, served with the same sauce, ought to please onion ring lovers.

Burmese salads are intriguing, not like anything you’d find in other Asian restaurants. Samusa salad, for example, is just what it sounds like: Indian-style potato-stuffed samosas torn into pieces and tossed with seasonings reminiscent of Indian curry. Eat it while the pastry wrappers are still crisp.

The prosaic name “vegetable noodle salad” doesn’t hint at the exciting blend of flavors: noodles, cucumber, cabbage and bean fritters. The effect is sweet and sour, salty and crunchy.

Mohinga salad, which mixes rice noodles with sliced fish cake, crisp-fried shallots and, again, sweet-and-sour seasonings, would please anyone who likes pad Thai.

But for the more adventurous, the taste of the salad of fermented tea leaves will prove, well, different; murky, you might call it. Fish paste (ngapi, sometimes spelled gnapi) is quite pungent and spicy: I remember how a friend in Yangon (Rangoon) would dilute it with lots of lime juice, which makes it palatable. Ngapi is eaten with raw vegetables--at Yoma, lettuce and cucumber.

The restaurant has both Burmese and Thai green-papaya salads. Each is described the same way (“papaya with spicy lemon dressing”), but they’re distant relatives at best. The Burmese version is mellow, without the sharp, spicy, sweet-and-sour tang of Thai som tam. Yoma’s som tam is less sweet than the usual Thai rendition, but that is not a fault. Dried shrimp add a briny note.

Yoma makes a goat curry with a thick, dark brown sauce that shows Indian influence, but it’s unlike what you’d find in India. The fish cake curry is strong and rather sour. The easiest to enjoy is the mild chicken and potato curry. All curries come with rice and a clear, light tamarind leaf soup.

It seems absurd to pass up the Burmese dishes for Thai food, which you can get anywhere. But if you absolutely must have pad Thai, you’ll find it satisfactory, with a deep, mellowly sweet flavor. The panang beef curry is as pleasing as candy in its sweet, luscious coconut sauce. Shrimp kaprow includes more onions than usual and not as much basil, but it’s worth ordering anyway. Instead of less expensive thigh meat cubed and threaded on a stick, each chicken sate here is a slice of chicken breast, yellow from curry spices. The skewers come with the customary peanut sauce, fluffy and sweet with coconut milk, and a diced cucumber relish.

Drinks include Thai iced tea and coffee and Burmese tea, a hot, sweetened milky drink like Indian chai but without spices.

As a sort of Burmese cultural center, Yoma sells Burmese music CDs, plays Burmese karaoke on the TV and sells Burmese condiments. It’s a small restaurant with a big mission: to popularize a cuisine almost unknown around here.

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Yoma, 713 E. Garvey Ave., Monterey Park. (626) 280-8655. Open 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday through Monday; closed Tuesday. No alcohol. Street parking. Cash only. Dinner for two, food only, $12 to $25.

What to get: chicken potato curry, vegetable noodle salad, mohinga salad, Myanmar ginger salad, samusa salad, papaya salad, fried opo, pad Thai, panang curry with beef, chicken sate.