Brockton Villa is not an exception. This cliffside cafe is everything La Jolla stands for, with old white people eating noveau-Californian cuisine and looking out onto the cove. Nothing about the restaurant bucks this fact, but sometimes there’s a food item on a menu that crosses the lines of class warfare. That fact is obvious every time I walk into a hole-in-the-wall taqueria to find white businessmen in nice suits, glossy magazines in hand (and an article written by Jonathan Gold within). It’s also true in the case of Brockton Villa, where students brave the bourgeois for a taste of French Toast in the morning. It’s a worthwhile trip across the picket line; the custard within crust is more dessert than breakfast, more decadent than decent, and more creamy than any La Jolla sunset.

Brockton Villa
1235 Coast Blvd
La Jolla, CA 92037

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I overreact. The reality is that I don’t live close enough to the Mission district to consistently try enough local Mexican food. After so many misses I keep going back to one of the few hits, the Tacos San Buena truck at 16th and Folsom. Tacos San Buena is a fleet of trucks that fan out across the less peopled sectors of the Mission district and beyond, in places where bars are legally mandated to close by 10pm and liquor stores stop bothering to refrigerate.

San Buena trucks serve tacos in the Southern California style. They are simple Tijuana street tacos with stewed meats and paired sauces. The truth is, no, Tacos San Beuna trucks wouldn’t be destination drives in LA or SD, but in the Mission, sometimes it’s the closest I can get to the kind of Mexican food that I fell in love with once upon a time. Viva the little things!

Tacos San Buena
Shotwell and 16th St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

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Yak is the enlightened meat. It’s lean like buffalo but juicy like beef. It’s raised at high elevation in the Himalayas and in Colorado, this mystical creature that exists, in my experience, in exotic children’s books and adventure tales, up among the clouds, both divine and a bit awkward – like a god in a Miyazaki film, or the transferred spirit in a Murakami novel. It’s healthy, it’s tasty, and it’s definitely different.

The unexpected thing about Tara’s Yak Chili is an emphasis on the chili. The meat is tough, like jerky, but the texture is almost necessary – because it’s spicy. It’s really, really spicy, and the ensuing endorphins do nothing to subtract from the lightheaded, wondrous feeling of a yak-eating ritual that cannot feel anything but holy.

Tara’s Himalayan Cuisine
10855 Venice Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034

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What is Burmese cuisine?

The question is problematic. I’ve been asking it for over a year, and I know as little about the topic now as I did when I first moved to San Francisco. Something as straight forward as “beef curry” is a saucy Thai-Indian dish at Larkin Express, but by the same name is Chinese stir-fry at the Mission’s Yamo. Meanwhile, the originating region of Myanmar might be even less homogenized, or different altogether, from what I’ve gleaned from the internet.

There’s an uncanny valley (or ocean) between any cuisine as portrayed on menus in America and the original food culture from whence the immigrants immigrated. There’s error in proportion, suggesting that people in Japan are always eating ramen and sushi. And there’s error in name; Pad Thai is rarely found in restaurants in Thailand, Fresh Mex is a California invention, and Caesar salad was first tossed together by a someone named Caesar in San Diego. Not only is the idea of Burmese cuisine inconsistent in San Francisco, it also probably wouldn’t be recognized by its extended family back in Myanmar.

If there is a standardized definition of American Burmese food in San Francisco, it would be Burma Café in Daly City. The double-dollar-sign restaurant opened seemingly overnight in 2010, a brightly painted building that stands out next door to a popular dim sum spot. The website cites its reason for existing as “…to serve a large demand for Burmese food in Daly City,” and for the most part, that’s the impression Burma Café instills in all first comers. This is a new Burmese restaurant. Burmese cuisine is hot right now. We are fulfilling a quota.

I don’t mean that the Burmese American owners are not earnest in their ploy to open and maintain a restaurant. However, on a superficial level, Burma Café gives off a pre-fab mantra. The interior is very clean, pleasant and comfortable. It’s stocked with easy-on-the-eyes, abstract decorations and interior design, as if the whole restaurant were purchased as a finished set, like a completed room in Ikea. In other words, it’s the farthest thing from Daly City’s other Burmese restaurant, Little Yangon, which is weathered by neighborhood history and personality. Whereas Little Yangon couldn’t exist anywhere else, Burma Café would look the same in a mall in Chicago as it does in a hilly Daly City shopping center.

The menu at Burma Café is the only Burmese restaurant menu that hasn’t left me frowning at pictures or asking a waitress what to expect. The menu itself is short and includes little else than the staples I’ve come to recognize across different restaurants in the Bay Area. It’s almost as if Burma Café takes items that are popular in other Burmese restaurants, simplifies a multifaceted cuisine and packages the food culture into an easily consumed product.

Standardized or not, Burma Café cooks up delicious food. The Chicken Briyani is a side that can double as a main dish, a Jumbalaya of Asian flavors. Rice is cooked in a clay pot with cashews, onions, raisins, cinnamon, cardamom and generous morsels of fatty, flavorful chicken. On its own the Briyani is a tad too salty, but mixed with sweet curry dishes the spices round out just right. One of those sweet spoon-able entrees is Kabocha Pork, a slow-cooked stew that is well-spiced with ginger and dominated by the taste of candied squash. It isn’t perfect; the pork is a little tough and the kabocha a little dry; but Burma Café isn’t trying to be the best Burmese restaurant in the Bay. It’s just filling a quota.

I have no idea how close Burma Café’s selections are to the native cuisine of Myanmar. In fact, I don’t know if the same ingredients would be found in Burmese restaurants outside of the Bay Area. I’m not sure what goes on in the minds of Burmese American restaurant owners when the menu is put together, how much of it is designed to meet expectations of local diners, and if it feels at all disloyal when they add lettuce to their Tea Leaf Salad.

The end result is a menu and a style of food that originates from the Myanmar region, but has been cultivated many times since. It’s been refracted by the palates of a different population of restaurant patrons, of non-Burmese, and even of the Burmese American immigrants whose cultural identity is ever changing, who themselves might not know much about Myanmar anymore.

The food has been simplified to make it easier to serve and to maximize profit. It’s been watered down and spiced back up and changed a little bit here and there, an evolution of culture and taste and culinary ritual. The cuisine’s journey has been longer than the original trip from Myanmar to California. Of course it has changed. It’s not inauthentic. It’s just another chapter in the story of a meal.

Burma Café
63 St. Francis Sq.
Daly City, CA 94015

The Eaten Path: Mission of Burma SF
June 22, 2011: Burmese Kitchen (Larkin Express)
July 7, 2011: Mandalay Restaurant
July 27, 2011: Little Yangon
November 11, 2011: Burma Café

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That’s not the case in San Diego, where the next best thing is right at your fingertips, on the next aisle over. La Salsa Chilena is available in select stores across Southern California, and San Diegans and Angelenos should count their blessings that they should be so lucky. Doubting shoppers pass by, believing all those so-called pico de gallos in the refrigerated section are the same. Most salsa fans grab the spiciest one they can find and call it day. Next time you get chance, grab the La Salsa Chilena mild, experience how bold a mild salsa can be, and enjoy enough cilantro to cure a third degree bout of salmonella. It’s that delicious.

La Salsa Chilena
La Salsa Chilena on Facebook

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Then there are times when everything that makes diners great intersects with everything that makes food great. Diners by their nature cut quality for convenience, but every once in awhile there’s an exception, like Jodie’s, like Lois, like Tokyo 7-7 (R.I.P.), and it’s those kinds of exceptions that keep me trolling the eaten path instead of learning how to cook. It’s those kinds of exceptions that I live for, and one of those exceptions can be found in a corner diner in a corner bowling alley at the corner of Mar Vista in West Los Angeles. Pepy’s Galley is like any other of L.A.’s Mexican-American breakfast greasy spoons, though it’s better than most, an unlikely quality of cookery for a place that you might walk into wearing bowling shoes.

But on Wednesdays Pepy’s can be more than just an above average breakfast spot, because on Wednesdays, the special is Corned Beef Hash. Soft, large chunks of corned beef laugh in the face of the word diced. Blackened edges add just enough crisp and charred flavor to balance the fatty meat with gooey egg. Round it out with coffee and potatoes – I’m sure it doesn’t get any better.

Pepy’s Galley
12125 Venice Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90066

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Floridians can get surly when it comes to Key Lime Pie. I don’t blame them when bakeries across California serve too-sweet lime pies colored green and label them “Key” on menus. I’ve never tried the real thing, but breakfasts at Lois the Pie Queen have got me thinking:

Maybe the best key lime pie in California has no lime at all, key or otherwise. Maybe the closest thing we’ve got is a tart, sweet, slice of graham-crusted refreshment at a little North Oakland soul food diner. And maybe there’s an Oakland native living in Florida right now, wishing real key lime pies were a little closer to Lois’s lemon icebox.

Lois the Pie Queen
851 60th St.
Oakland, CA 94609
510.658.5616

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Fact: Delis and butchers serve good cold cut sandwiches.
Fact: Produce markets serve good vegetarian sandwiches. Probably. They should.
Fact: Smoothie shops that are next door to produce markets serve good sandwiches. Confirmed.

Senor Mango’s may not look like much, but success in the smoothie game is a simple recipe, simply stated: Keep it simple (and use fresh ingredients). Senor Mango’s takes the philosophy to heart and never fails to send out the freshest goods over the counter in blended form, delicious treats that you probably could have made at home if you bothered to walk next door and buy the same ingredients.

The same goes for the tortas. The chefs at Senor Mango’s aren’t world beaters. They aren’t even egg beaters. They slice up tasty stuff from next door (deep red tomatoes, crispy lettuce, oozing avocados, hot chiles, and perfect pan) and assemble. Even if the meat is less than the quality of butchers, delis or carnicerias. Even if the lomo (a dry-cured pork tenderloin) is smothered by melted American cheese. The Lomo Torta is not a good sandwich despite the lomo. It’s a great sandwich that happens to have pork in the middle.

Senor Mango’s
4607 30th St
San Diego, CA 92116
(619) 584-0041

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When tourists come to San Francisco, they eat Chinese food in Chinatown. There’s nothing wrong with that. Chinatown is a cool place, and there’s good food there.

However, it isn’t too bold to claim that the best Chinese food in the Bay Area is not in SF’s Chinatown. That opinion is old hat by now. The nomenclature of neighborhoods is out of date, unable to roam across cities like their namesake demographics. Los Angeles’ Chinatown cannot compare to San Gabriel Valley, and I wonder, is Manhattan’s Gangs of New York playground still fending off Flushing in the eyes of eat-geeks? Nowadays there are just as many San Franciscans hunting dim sum in the Richmond or South Bay as there are tourists on Kearny.

Perhaps it’s swung too far and Chinatowns are underrated. Or perhaps it’s much more complicated than that, because there’s rarely a choice on the form of America to differentiate between Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and Hong Kong Chinese. The nomenclature of centuries-old city planning never accounted for that. The Bay Area is nearly one quarter Chinese, but that’s counting immigrants from Hong Kong. It’s counting folks from Taiwan. And it’s counting the quickly growing Burmese population in California.

Where is Little Burma? The highest percentage of Burmese-Americans live in the San Gabriel Valley, Los Angeles County’s biggest Chinatown. The next largest population can be found spread throughout the Bay Area, untraceably living amongst the various Asian-American communities of San Francisco and South Bay. If there’s one neighborhood more Burmese than another, I haven’t discovered it, and I wonder if we’re waiting for some food writer to nickname a spatter pattern of restaurants “Little Burma”, because in the end, it’s always food that decides.

Unfortunately in the Bay Area, trendy Burmese restaurants outnumber the regular, family-run eateries that consistently represent demographics. The Richmond District has its fair share of Burmese churches and probably leads California in per-capita Burmese dining establishments, but most of those restaurants have waitlists full of names that aren’t Burmese. Despite that, I might have still guessed that the Inner Richmond deserved the nickname “Little Burma” more than any other neighborhood. I would have, until I stepped into Little Yangon.

Of all the Burmese restaurants I’ve stepped into since moving to San Francisco, Little Yangon has put me the most at ease. It’s a little place on a big street in Daly City, removed from any kind of trend, a diner that just happens to serve Burmese food instead of American. The windows aren’t covered with “Best Of” posters and Zagat plaques, and most passersby would probably write it off as rather mundane. In the Burmese restaurant scene of the Bay Area, that in itself might be enough to make it special.

Little Yangon serves greasy spoon Burmese cuisine. The bu tee kyaw, Burmese-fried squash, are like zucchini fries found at late-night snacks stops ala Pasadena’s Lucky Boy, but on a plate with dipping sauce. The texture of the fried egg noodles makes me thing they were cooked on a frying pan rather than a wok, rubbery and weighed down by flavor. It’s comfort food, not unlike an Okinawan diner I loved in Honolulu – delicious and uncomplicated.

Nothing captures this comfort more than creamy Ohn Noh Kaw Swe, a coconut-based, chicken noodle soup that is as thick, sweet and rich as any chowder. The lemon undercuts its richness, and the dish is my favorite of those I’ve tried at Little Yangon, a dark horse candidate for my favorite Burmese restaurant yet.

Little Yangon is not the only Burmese restaurant in Daly City, but for a neighborhood that is nearly fifty-percent Filipino, “Little Burma” hardly seems appropriate. Maybe there are other parts of South Bay more qualified, and maybe there aren’t. After eating at Little Yangon, I know for certain that the Richmond District qualifies not at all. If a neighborhood is going to earn the honor of representing any ethnic group, even a sub-group, it needs at least one mom-and-pop, comfort-food diner of the cuisine in question.

Heck, any neighborhood could stand to have a Little Yangon.

Little Yangon
6318 Mission St
Daly City, CA 94014

The Eaten Path: Mission of Burma SF
June 22, 2011: Burmese Kitchen (Larkin Express)
July 7, 2011: Mandalay Restaurant
July 27, 2011: Little Yangon

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When the number 38 bus reaches Geary and Third late on a Saturday night, I don’t have to look up to know I’m almost home. Every girl in a skirt and every guy in plaid disembarks on cue in a litany of pre-party diatribes en route to Buckshot, Inner Richmond’s only destination for two-dollar beers and skee-ball. Moments later a much quieter bus, full of older homebodies like me, continues west into the dreary, fog-laden land between Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, where the biggest party animals are sixty-somethings arguing about local sports nostalgia.

Geary and Third is also the last relevant stop for a different kind of westbound San Franciscan, for a different reason. Destination dinners in the Inner Richmond tend to have a theme, and all folks twenty-five and older from all ends of the peninsula have deemed it worth their time to visit Clement Street for Burmese food. Deservedly or not, it’s become a feature of the neighborhood. Even though there are other Burmese restaurants spread throughout the city, the Richmond has a few, and each is a bright spot on a gray landscape – as long as it isn’t too far west.

Of course, for most San Franciscans making the pilgrimage to my part of town, the word “Burmese” means one thing; Burma Superstar; and flocks of white folk in business casual crowd around the entrance of the Clement Street hotspot, waiting upwards of three hours to sit within elbow distance of the bathroom and another table. Those same folk walk out of Burma Superstar two hours later with smiles on their faces, because the food really is as delicious as the place is trendy, but there’s still something a little off-putting about this longstanding San Francisco ritual: Mandalay Restaurant is only four blocks away.

The Inner Richmond is ground zero for SF’s Burmese craze. Burma Superstar hit the ground running in 1992, leading to follow-up locations in Berkeley and Alameda, all but branding the trend with its catchy name and eclipsing another successful Burmese restaurant in the area, and one that was already eight years old before a superstar arrived on the scene. Mandalay Restaurant, the original Burmese restaurant in the city, is only one block north of Clement Street, but maybe it’s one bus stop too far. In that short distance the fog gets thicker, the weather gets colder and the amount of people in the mood for tea leaf salad thins until only residents of the area, diehard fans and older homebodies are left.

Because there’s such a lightning rod four blocks away, the resulting atmosphere of Mandalay Restaurant feels a bit more local. The only thing brighter than the green and yellow of the California Street exterior are the tacky decorations and salesmanship of the hostess inside. Light-up palm trees and Christmas ornaments add a sloppy do-it-yourself aspect to the usual Buddhist tapestries, but despite the range of decor there is something tasteful and homey about the interior of Mandalay, and there’s even something elegant to the plating and preparation of the food.

The food here is different from the kinds of meals found at Larkin Express. The theory that Burmese cuisine is a medley of Thai, Chinese and Indian influences is in full effect at Mandalay. The Samusas are basically Samosas. The Burmese Iced Tea is basically Thai Iced Tea. The hot-and-sour soup is indistinguishable from Chinese restaurants, and the “Mandalay Chicken” isn’t just a relative of Orange Chicken; it is Orange Chicken. In fact, compared to other Burmese restaurants I’ve tried thus far, Mandalay seems to lean strongest toward Chinese influence than any other.

That said, there’s no lack of uniquely Burmese items on the menu, including a number of traditional salads and noodle dishes. One highlight is the Mandalay Special Noodle (not pictured), a medley of ingredients that are tossed tableside instead of blended into a sauce or flipped on a wok into a homogenous stir fry. The preparation of dishes as deconstructed, minced and tossed seems to be a common characteristic, and the most obvious examples are the salads, mixtures of fruits, roots, leaves and nuts that can resemble anything from coleslaw to trail mix.The citrus and spices in Mandalay’s salads remind me of poke or ceviche, spicy and tart, but these salads take it one step further. There is an earthiness and bitterness to each bite, elevating popular appetizers to the superstars of meals.

If salad is the obvious common denominator between the wide range of restaurants that make up San Francisco’s Burmese scene, second place goes to the mango. Pickled, fried or served like ceviche, the mango seems to be the king of fruits in the Burmese food chain. Mandalay Restaurant is no different, and the Mango Salad is delicious proof.

The meat, whether it’s chicken, lamb, pork or beef, has never failed to be juicy and done right by its spicy and tangy accompaniment. The green beans, shrimp and squid have great crisp and snap. The homemade lemonades, the complimentary mango pudding, the tea leaf salad… everything I’ve tried at Mandalay has been great, which is why it might be my favorite Burmese restaurant yet. The prices are a bit cheaper than Burma Superstar’s down the street, but dinners can range from fifteen to twenty-five bucks, assuming an order of salad is involved – a meal at Mandalay is still too pricey for everyday consumption. Outside of the everyday, Mandalay Restaurant should be on the radar of anyone who likes Burmese food.

Not that Mandalay isn’t already on plenty radars, because dinners at the bright green and yellow restaurant require reservations and waits, too. The waits just tend to be closer to ten minutes than three hours. I’m not suggesting that those folks disembarking the bus at Geary and Third should walk the four extra blocks to Mandalay, and I’m not even suggesting that Mandalay is better than Burma Superstar. They are different kinds of restaurants, and they don’t need to be compared simply because they share the same word on the awning.

I am suggesting that my neighborhood is worth venturing into past Geary and Third, and I am suggesting, that when the words “Burmese” and “Inner Richmond” are spoken in the same sentence, it shouldn’t be a foregone conclusion which restaurant is being talked about.

Mandalay Restaurant
4344 California St
San Francisco, CA 94118
(415) 386-3896

The Eaten Path: Mission of Burma SF
June 22, 2011: Burmese Kitchen (Larkin Express)
July 7, 2011: Mandalay Restaurant
July 27, 2011: Little Yangon

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