RESTAURANT REVIEWS: Onyx

Okay, so this is not the best photo, but it’s the only one I’ve got (that doesn’t have either myself or my friends in it — and I don’t want to be identified).

Onyx was another one of my favourite places in Yangon.  It is owned by a super cool Korean guy named Martin.  The decor in Onyx is pretty sparse, but that’s actually what makes it work so well.  The low lighting, bare brick walls and the simple tables and tablecloths make you feel right at home.  The food here is delicious, and on top of that, the prices at Onyx are some of the most reasonable in Yangon.  When I first moved to Burma, a steak at Onyx would set you back only 4000 Kyats.  These days, the cost of a steak here has gone up to 6000 Kyats, but still, that’s hardly going to break the bank, even if you are on a budget.  A glass of house red will set you back a mere 3000 Kyats, and an entire bottle is only 10,000 Kyats.  Are you starting to see why this was one of my favourite places in Yangon?  😉

Mohinga

 

I’ve mentioned before that Burmese food is not my favourite cuisine.  However, I did really enjoy mohinga.  Mohinga is a type of soup with rice noodles in a fish broth with vegetables.  Often, the vendors have a kind of deep-fried corn cracker which you can pay extra to have added to your mohinga.  When the vendors serve you the mohinga, there are sides of coriander, dried red chili flakes, and lime wedges, which you can add to taste.  Burmese people do NOT like spicy food, so they were always horrified by the amount of red chili flakes that I added to my mohinga, but I liked it just fine.  

If you go to Burma and are aghast by the prices there, you will be able to eat cheaply and just fine on mohinga.  It usually runs about 400 kyats (about 50 cents) per serving, and that includes a free refill of broth plus, depending on the vendor, unlimited tea. 

Tea Shops

Anyone who’s been to Burma or researched a trip to Burma or maybe even read anything whatsoever about Burma (Burmese Days, anyone?) probably knows about the Burmese affinity for tea shops.  They are everywhere in Burma.  I snapped this shot of a tea shop on my route home one day and was surprised by how beautiful it looked in the photo because, truth be told, I always thought of the street which it was on (Sayasan Road) as kind of junky-looking.  But this shot makes it look quite idyllic, which is, now that there is time and distance between me and Burma, how I would actually prefer to remember it.

Portable Restaurant

I posted a photo awhile ago of a woman in Bangkok who used a yoke to be a roving som tam vendor.  Here in Yangon, there are a lot more roving street vendors that use yokes.  Most of them sell mohinga (I think).

RESTAURANT REVIEWS: Alamanda

Alamanda is one of my all-time favourite restaurants.  It’s an open-air French restaurant attached to a cute little French inn which has all kinds of colonial charm.  The restaurant is surrounded by a beautiful garden, and the whole place is just all kinds of comfortable.  Not only does this place have some of the best wifi in Yangon, but no one seems too bothered if you sit down with just a cappucino for a few hours and surf the net on your laptop.  But!  There’s more!  The food at Alamanda is delicious, too.  They make amazing baguettes, salads, steaks, and tajines.  Everyday, for both lunch and dinner, they offer a set menu for only 8,000 kyats, and it never disappoints.

Tripey Treats

Here is an example of something I never ate when I lived in Burma.  I saw street vendors boiling up tripe quite often, but I never had the stomach fo actually trying any of it.  Actually, it smelled pretty good, but every damn time I got close enough to see what it was, I had to keep on walking.  That’s all for today, folks!

Shan Noodles

Alright, so I didn’t love Burmese food.  At all.  Most of it has fermented fish paste as a dominant ingredient.  Even if used in small doses, fermented fish paste just can’t help being dominant.  I mean, it’s something you’ve gotta smell to believe.  But there were a few Burmese foods that I could not only stomach, but actually sincerely enjoyed, and Shan noodles was one such food.

You can get Shan noodles all over Yangon, but I would always get mine from the HomeK restaurant in the corridor between C Block and D Block of the Pearl Condo Complex.  Shan noodles is basically rice noodles with a kind of chicken bolognese, topped with deep fried garlic, ground peanuts, sesame seeds, and a few other things that I can’t remember anymore.  It comes with a side of chicken stock, which you are meant to pour over your noodles.  Then, you mix it all up, and it is delicious!

Watermelons

I’ve talked about some out there tropical fruit like durians and dragonfruit.  I’ve talked about some tropical fruit which isn’t as out there but is either scarce or expensive in most western countries, like mangoes are.  But I’ve never talked about a fruit that is considered normal in North America.  Nothing is as quintessential to a summer barbecue or picnic in North America as a big slice of watermelon.  What makes the watermelons in Burma feel so foreign, reminding you that you are, in fact, in a distant land, eating fruit grown in distant lands, is the sheer quantity of the fruit which the vendors have piled behind them.

Mango Season

Mango season in South Asia starts around May and lasts through until July or August.  You never really realise just how many mango trees there are in Yangon until the mangoes start dropping at your feet as you’re walking down the street.  That’s what happened just before I took this photo.  I was walking home from the supermarket and a mango dropped out of the sky just a few feet in front of me.  I was all, “It’s raining MANgoes!”  Bad puns aside, I couldn’t help taking a picture of the mango where it had dropped at my feet so I’d always remember the time I lived in the place where huge, fresh, ripe, juicy, delicious mangoes dropped from the sky at your feet, a seeming offering from the gods.  Now, I’m back to living in a place where I have to go to a supermarket and spend $10 if I want to enjoy a mango.  Ah, nostalgia.  Le sigh…

Dragonfruit… and ants!

The guy I was dating in Burma had heard that one of his favourite musicians would always start his day with fruit, so my boyfriend then started eating fruit for breakfast, so then I started always eating fruit for breakfast.

Pretty much the only fruit I would ever eat in Burma was dragonfruit.  It’s the fruit that is hot pink on the outside and looks kind of spiky, but is super easy to cut into.  On the inside, you find about a million tiny black seeds embedded into flesh that is either blood red or pure white, as in this picture.  On the particular day that I took this photo, I wasn’t hungry enough for a whole dragonfruit, so I ate only hlf.  Since I was in a rush, I forgot to put the other half of the fruit away, and when I came home from work later that day, I found my dragon fruit absolutely crawling with ants.  Yep, if you look carefully at this photo, all those little brown things are ants.  And, what’s more, it took a few tries before I got the picture I liked, and by the time I snapped this particular picture, a LOT of the ants had gotten spooked and gone away.