Last night I took my host out for Burmese food, since there’s a fairly new Burmese restaurant in Davis called “My Burma“. And of course since neither of us had had Burmese food (there isn’t a single Burmese restaurant in Chicago, though there’s one in the suburbs), we had to go.
It turns out that Burmese food resembles a hybrid between Indian and southeast Asian food, with some unique items like tea leaf salad. We had a largish meal, and I’ll show it below. (The menu is here.). It’s a modest restaurant but the food is excellent. Here’s the interior:
The appetizer: Platha and coconut chicken curry dip, described as “handmade multilayered bread served with coconut chicken curry.” With a couple of good beers, this was an excellent start. You can either dip the bread into the chicken curry or pour the curry over the bread and eat it with a fork. I oped to use my hands.
The restaurant’s most famous dish is the tea leaf salad, described as “fermented tea leaf dressing, lettuce or cabbage, peanut, fried garlic, tomato, sunflower seeds, fried yellow chickpeas, jalapenos, sesame seed, and lemon. They bring it to the table looking like this, with the green tea leaves on top (picture from the website)
. . . and then mix it thoroughly until it looks like what’s below (I would have preferred to sample it unmixed). Our version seemed to lack the tomatoes and jalapenos.
It was very good, with a melange of flavors, but the flavor of the tea leaves wasn’t evident, which was disappointing.
Then two main dishes, the first being chili lamb, described as “diced lamb tossed with chili sauce, garlic, onion, basil, jalapenos, and chili flakes.” The server asked us how hot we wanted it on a scale of 1 (mild) to 5 (fiery), and I said “3.2”. It turned out to be a tasty dish but not very hot, with the scale probably ratcheted down for the American palate:
Second main: Burmese eggplant curry, described as “Burmese curry made with garlic, onion, tomato, and tender eggplant.” It was very good, and yes, the eggplant, while keeping its form, was tender and delicious, in a lovely sauce.
With it I ordered Basmati rice. Rice should really come with the meal rather than requiring a separate order, and I eat a LOT of rice with a dinner like this. Sadly, we got only a small dish that was grossly insufficient. It was good rice, but I needed a HUGE bowl of white rice to sop up all the sauce.
All in all, it’s a good restaurant, especially considering that Davis, for a college town, has a dearth of decent places to eat. If you go, see if you can get a huge portion of white rice, and eat Chinese style, putting the ingredients atop a bowl of the rice. (They don’t use chopsticks, and I guess they don’t in Burma, but I would have preferred them.)
After dinner we went to the David Food Coop, a hippie-ish grocery store that’s been going her since 1972. Like Austin, Davis is an island of Sixties-ness surrounded by a desert of agriculture, and many old hippies are still to be found shambling along the streets of town. (There are also a fair number of homeless people, something I haven’t seen here before.)
And in this cool town, heavily invested in recycling and other green efforts, the Food Coop is the epicenter. It has pretty much everything you want, from loose grains to Dr. Bronner’s soaps, although prices are high because most stuff is organic, and the coolness surely exacts a surcharge. Here are three characteristic items.
In a place like the Food Coop, sugar is demonized. When I did my postdoc here and my parents came to visit (this was probably about 1980), I took them for brunch to a hippy-ish organic restaurant, now defunct, called the Blue Mango. My father ordered coffee with cream, and noticed that there was no sugar on the table. He asked for some. The waiter looked at him with a stinkeye and said, in all seriousness, “Sorry, we don’t have White Death. But we might be able to dig up some honey in the kitchen.” My father, an old-school Army guy, took a pass on the honey.
At the food coop, the Satanic nature of sugar is clear. All items in bins have a four-number numerical code, but it used to be just three numbers. At that time, white sugar was given the Devil’s Number: 666. Now that they have to use four numbers, they simply expanded it, keeping its Satanic qualities:
And they also had this. WTF? What was it recycled from?
One thing that’s always bothered me about the food coop, which prides itself on selling healthy and organic food, is that it also has a whole aisle of homeopathic products, which of course is pure quackery: high-priced water containing not a molecule of the “curative” substance. They should stop selling this useless stuff. Here, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, is a big scam:
But we took a pass on the fraudulent cures because we were there for dessert, and bought bean-curd-filled mochi covered with sesame seeds. They were great (no photo attached).
OH!
Is this related to the recent poetry post?
I think we know the answer …
Burma Shave
🙂
This food looks great. Makin’ some basmati right now.
There is a nice study by Stevinson et al in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine from 2003, showing homeopathic arnica having no effect. (This interested me because I have used non-homeopathic arnica for pain relief.)
100% recycled paper (no virgin trees used!)
We understand why you might think this, but the answer is no — we use post consumer waste paper! Ok, we hear it now too. We use recycled office paper, not used toilet paper, to make our TP. Get your head out of the sewer!
Our recycled materials are sourced locally to our production facilities from schools and office buildings. It consists primarily of old office supplies like letterheads, memos and maybe even a love letter or two. We take recycled paper waste and turn it into TP gold.
https://us.whogivesacrap.org/products/100-recycled-toilet-paper-jumbo-rolls
I know! I was just joshing!
yes, but i was surpisd to find that it was recycled office paper. I had assumed it was unused wood scraps and trimmings which don’t really fit my definition of recycling but apparently is officially acceptable.
Looks like a night for a run to the local Indian/Nepalese restaurant down the street.
Even less fiery than the 3.2 dish is the lamb pi.
Once I had a sick headache and went into our local Whole Foods to buy some ibuprofen. When I got to the pain reliever aisle, I simply couldn’t find it anywhere! The aisle was full of pseudo pain relievers and herbal remedies, but no ibuprofen. When I asked a grocer if they had ibuprofen, acetaminophen, or aspirin he told me that they didn’t carry those, but he offered to direct me to the herbal pain relievers. Homeopathic medicines? Pathetic.
My undergraduate college had a food co-op. It was in the same building as the kosher kitchen. Anyway, I loved the Gouda cheese from the food co-op and it was fun seeing the giant bags of loose grains, nuts, and all the rest. The rats loved those!
Have students of biogeography ever studied the cline of 60s/hippiedom? I have the impression that one such cline runs north from the Bay area to Vancouver, British Columbia. The hippieness gradually declines with distance from California, with local concentrated nodes in Eugene and Portland; the former node in Seattle has been largely superseded by more recent, high-tech cultural developments. Here, instead of sugar or aspirin, they would try to sell you an “app”. At a lower tech level, crystals/herbal remedies have long since yielded place to legalized pot, now a big-time industry in the process of being corporatized.
I think that cities like Davis, Portland, Austin, Santa Cruz, and so on should be declared Natural Historic Cultural Preserves. There’s even one town in Northern California (I can’t remember its name) that has no signs on the roads directing drivers to it, and no street signs in the town. That one should also be included.
That’s Bolinas.
It’s a very small community on the coast, near Stinson Beach (just follow the spit, cross a couple of hundred feet of water, and you’re in Bolinas.
The sign directing motorists from Highway 1 (the Coastside Highway) to Bolinas was removed several times by Bolinas residents; but last time we drove down 1 past the turnoff the sign was there – I believe removing it went out of fashion some years back. Besides, with GPS, Bolinas can’t hide by removing the sign. It’s not a wealthy community at all, except for a few rich folks’ houses, and just one general store.
That Platha looks like the “roti” we ate for breakfast everyday in Malaysia. Yum!
“…high-priced water containing not a molecule of the “curative” substance…”
Ah! My dear author…remember that homeopathy states that the water is effective with merely the “memory” of the substance advertised. No molecules required!
It doesn’t contain a “memory” of the substance, either. People often buy the stuff thinking that there is indeed some curative substance in it, but highly diluted. They don’t realize that the dilution is so strong that not a molecule remains (well, there could be one or two_. But my point is the same: this is a scam, pure and simple.
Burmese food RULES, esp if you like Indian and Thai. We have (just) a few in Manhattan, usually pricey. But worth it.
There’s a Georgian place near my apartment back home (I’m in FL now) which I’ll try when I get back. Lots of shows rave about Georgian food.
D.A.
NYC
Yeah, that’s a tiny portion of rice. Surprising. Looks like it was seasoned with turmeric. Either way, the food looks great. I’ve never seen a Burma restaurant, but I want to try the food!
Prof JC you are a true light in the darkness. Who else can expound on science, global politics, lovely animals and tasty dishes like you?
I know of none other.