What to eat in Myanmar, and where

The organising ideas are sourness, fermentation and texture. Burmese cooks ferment tea leaves and eat them. They build entire dishes out of contrasting crunches. They use tamarind, lime and pickled things where a Thai kitchen would use chilli heat, and the result is a cuisine that is far less spicy than most people expect and far more sour.

Then there are two enormous outside influences sitting inside it: Indian, from the century when Yangon was one of the great Indian cities outside India, and Chinese, from centuries of trade across the northern and eastern borders. Both are still on the plate, and neither is a footnote.

The dishes to order

Mohinga

The national dish, a fish and rice noodle soup, eaten for breakfast, and the single best argument for getting up early in Myanmar.

A broth of catfish, lemongrass, ginger, garlic and ground toasted rice, thickened with chopped banana stem, poured over thin round rice noodles. Then you build it: crushed chilli, a squeeze of lime, coriander, a hard boiled egg, and a fried split-pea fritter or a fried gourd fritter broken over the top so it goes soft in the broth.

Every region makes it differently, and the version in a Yangon street stall at six in the morning is not the version at Inle. It costs under a dollar. Eat it every day. Eat it standing up if you have to.

Lahpet thoke, the tea leaf salad

The dish nobody else has. Tea leaves, fermented in bamboo underground, dressed with oil and lime and served with fried garlic, fried broad beans, roasted peanuts, sesame, dried shrimp, sliced tomato, shredded cabbage and green chilli. You mix it at the table until every mouthful has four textures in it.

It is bitter, sour, salty, savoury and mildly caffeinated. It is served at the end of a meal, at a negotiation, at a funeral and at four in the afternoon in a tea shop. If you eat one thing in Myanmar, this is it.

Shan noodles

Around Inle Lake and up through the Shan hills, the food changes. Shan khao swe is thin rice noodles with a light tomato and chicken or pork sauce, ground peanut, pickled mustard greens and a bowl of clear broth on the side. It comes wet, in the broth, or dry with the broth alongside, and dry is better.

The Shan kitchen more broadly is lighter than the Burmese one, less oily, more sour, with tofu made from chickpeas rather than soy. Shan tofu, warm and just set, sliced and dressed, or fried into fingers, is one of the best cheap things in the country. There is also nga htamin, Shan rice mixed with turmeric and flaked fish and pressed into a round, eaten with garlic oil and raw leeks.

Ohn no khao swe

Wheat noodles in a coconut and chicken broth thickened with chickpea flour, with a boiled egg, raw onion, lime, chilli oil and crisp fried noodles on top. It is the comfort dish, richer and rounder than mohinga, and if you have eaten Burmese food in London or New York this is probably the one you have had.

Nan gyi thoke

Thick round rice noodles tossed with chicken curry, chickpea flour, fried onion, lime and coriander. Salad, not soup, and eaten at breakfast. Think of it as mohinga’s dry cousin.

The curry lunch

The traditional Burmese meal is a table rather than a dish. You choose one or two curries, usually pork with mango pickle, chicken with turmeric, fish, or a beef curry cooked down for hours, and the kitchen fills the table around it: rice, a clear soup, a tray of raw and blanched vegetables with a fermented shrimp or bean dip called ngapi yay, a fried something, and usually a small dish of lahpet to finish. Refills of the side dishes are free.

This is the meal to have in a local restaurant with a guide who can order properly. It is also where the oil question comes up.

The honest note about oil

Burmese curries are cooked by a method called si byan, which means roughly “the oil returns”. The dish is cooked until the water has gone and the oil separates and rises to the top, and it is then served with that layer of oil sitting on it. Originally this was preservation: the oil seals the curry so it keeps through a hot day without refrigeration.

The result, to a visitor, is a bowl with what looks like a centimetre of oil on top. It is not carelessness and it is not a mistake. You are meant to eat the meat and the sauce from underneath and leave most of the oil, which is what everyone at the next table is doing.

Some people never get past it. If you are one of them, the Shan kitchen is your answer, along with the salads, the noodle dishes and the soups, and you will eat extremely well without ever ordering a curry. Tell your guide on the first day rather than the fourth.

The Indian and Chinese layers

Indian. Yangon’s downtown has a large and old Indian population, and the food is not an import, it is local. Paratha, called palata, fried on a flat plate and eaten with a bean curry for breakfast. Samusa thoke, samosas chopped up and turned into a salad with onion, mint, chickpea broth and lime, which is a genuinely brilliant idea. Biryani, called danbauk, cooked in enormous pots. Bean and lentil dishes throughout. The Indian quarter around Anawrahta Road is the best eating in Yangon and it is one street after another of it.

Chinese. Stronger in the north and in Mandalay, where the influence is Yunnanese: wheat noodles, hotpot, braises, and the barbecue and beer station culture in every town where you point at skewers in a tray and they come back grilled. Cheap, communal and the standard evening in Myanmar for people who are not tourists.

The tea shop

The tea shop is the institution. Low plastic stools, a metal table, a flask, and men and women sitting for an hour over a very small cup.

The default is lahpet yay cho, black tea with condensed milk and evaporated milk, sweet and strong. If you want it less sweet, ask for it cho seh or ask your guide to. Plain green tea comes free in a flask on the table, endlessly, and is what you drink between cups.

To eat alongside: e kya kway, the fried dough stick, dipped in the tea. Steamed buns. Small savoury pastries. Mont lin ma yar, batter balls with quail egg cooked in a dimpled pan and served two joined together, which translates roughly as “husband and wife snack”.

Sit in one for an hour in the late afternoon. It is a better cultural experience than most paid ones and it costs about fifty cents.

Sweets, and mont

Burmese sweets are called mont and are much less sweet than the Thai equivalent. Look for shwe kyi, a dense semolina cake, mont let saung, coconut milk with jaggery and tapioca pearls, and the palm sugar jaggery itself, sold in discs around Bagan, which tastes like a cleaner butterscotch.

What is overrated

Say the unhelpful thing when it is true.

The floating restaurants at Inle. Big, on stilts, built for boats to pull up to at one o’clock. The tempura is soggy and the fish is not the point. Eat in Nyaungshwe town in the evening instead, where the Shan food is very good and costs a fifth as much.

The “traditional Burmese set menu” on a tourist restaurant strip. In Nyaung U and parts of Bagan there are streets of restaurants serving a flattened, de-oiled, de-fermented version of the curry lunch to people who are nervous. It is not bad. It is just not the food, and the local place two streets back is better and cheaper.

Hotel breakfast. Almost every hotel serves a Western buffet with a token bowl of something Burmese. You are giving up mohinga for toast. Ask for a late breakfast, walk out at half past six and eat in the street.

Anything described as a cooking class in a hotel. The good ones start at a market at seven in the morning with a cook who shops there. The rest is a demonstration in a function room.

Where we would eat, by place

The food-led version of the standard route is food and culture, 11 days.

Related

• Myanmar: the complete guide to planning your trip
• Food and culture in Myanmar, 11 days
• Myanmar for the first time
• What we would skip in Myanmar
• All our Myanmar trips

Frequently asked questions