Chin star burmese restaurant

Over the past two decades, San Franciscans have established a permanent line on the south side of Clement between 4th and 5th Avenues. They sip tea and swap stories as they wait for a coveted table and a plate of laphet thoke (tea leaf salad) or a bowl of oh noh kauswer (coconut chicken noodle soup).

These exotic entrees were made popular by Desmond Tan, whose Burma Superstar garnered a cultish following after he and partner Joycelyn Lee took over the then eight-year-old business in As of March this year, Tan has finally published a cookbook, with the help of coauthor Kate Leahy: Burma Superstar: Addictive Recipes from the Crossroads of Southeast Asia (Ten Speed Press) and is giving fans access to the secret (and yes, addictive) recipes that have been bringing foodies to the Inner Richmond (as well as two East Bay locations) in droves.

Born in Yangon (formerly Rangoon), Myanmar's largest city, Tan came to SF's Richmond District at age Here, In his first-ever interview with an American publication, the chef shares his experience as "fresh-off-the-boat immigrant," cultural advocate, and employer of refugees. He also tells a few of the tales behind his restaurant's key recipes, some of which you can make for yourself at a four-hour Cook by the Book class ($; tickets still available), which will be hosted by Leahy at San Francisco Cooking School on Wednesday, May 3.

7x7: In the intro to your cookbook, you talk a bit about growing up in Burma. What was childhood like there?

Desmond Tan: To grow up here [in the U.S.], you need money. You need accessories. But growing up in Burma, there were no material items. There was nothing to do other than play soccer, chase each other, and climb trees. You'd throw rocks on tin roofs and make a bunch of noise. And nobody migrated, so you knew everybody. It was a community. It was tight. But I think now people are seeing things differently. The Burmese are migrating like they've never migrated in the past.

Tell us about immigrating to San Francisco.

Immigration was kind of new for Asians in the '70s. In those days, people didn't speak English. They were poor. They ate different things and dressed differently. Because of that, you got picked on persistently, even by other immigrants. I was called "fob" (fresh off the boat) all the time.

What are your early memories of eating at Burma Superstar, before you took it over?

It was a solid place. They served good, affordable food and it resonated with my family because there wasn't a lot of Burmese food in the city. It reminded me of home, and was the closest to my mom's cooking of anything that I was aware of.

After buying the restaurant in , you kept the name despite political controversy over how to refer to the country. Why?

Burma is a colonized name, but I was born way after the colonization, so I just know Burma as Burma. The name Myanmar [came about] in the late '80s because of the new government, but it didn't make a difference to me.

You work with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to hire refugees.

Nine years ago, the IRC contacted us. They had a lot of Burmese refugees and they wondered if we'd be interested in hiring them, and I said sure. I learned a lot about refugees and immigrants from that experience, including the relationships between different ethnic minorities (there are more than ). Afoo was our first hire. He didn't know anything and now he's our kitchen manager at Burma Love. The Chin corn soup recipe came from him.

How many Burmese people would you estimate have worked in your restaurants?

Hundreds. Practically the whole kitchen is Burmese. At Burma Love, we have a whole family working there. It's a mix of refugees and immigrants with really diverse backgrounds.

Eating at Burma Superstar can be an educational experience. You're kind of an ambassador for Burmese culture.

When we started the restaurant, literally no one knew Burma—they'd ask where it was. They'd ask what Burmese food was like and we'd tell them the country borders three areas (India, Thailand, and China) where they have really fantastic cuisine. So we have a lot of influence from those places, but at the same time there are a lot of flavors and dishes that are unique to Burma. We began to realize that, while a lot of these people had never been to Burma, they'd keep coming back to the restaurant and were getting educated about Burma through food.

Why do you think your restaurant has been so successful in SF?

Food is interesting. It's a basic thing to a lot of people, but also a daily activity. When a restaurant wants to be successful, they try to develop good food, a good environment, and good service. Maybe a third make it and, of those, maybe 15 percent really thrive. I think we got lucky because we introduced a fourth element, which was "edu-tainment," entertainment through educating people about Burma. Take the tea leaf salad, for example. We started by serving it already prepared and then we'd get all of these questions about what was in it. So we decided to separate it, explain all of the ingredients, and then mix it at the table.

Which entrees in the book best reflect the culture and people of Burma?

Mohinga, which is catfish chowder; oh noh kauswer, which is coconut noodle soup; tea leaf salad; the curries; and rice—you've gotta eat rice.

What's your personal favorite dish?

I always like mohinga because that's something that I group up with. It's my daughter's favorite dish, too.

What will readers find most surprising?

The story of the tea leaf salad and where the fermented tea leaf comes from. We didn't find any stories that were written down in English. It's an interesting little journey.

What are your hopes for the cookbook?

I don't think a lot of [ethnic] restaurants do the best that they can, and so they don't represent their cuisine, their country, or their people well. I'm beginning to feel some responsibility when people have heard about Burma because of Burma Superstar. That's a part of why we try do the restaurant right, because I am from Burma and I'm proud of being Burmese. I want people to see Burma in a positive way, and I think the book is an excellent way of doing that.

// Cook the Book, Wednesday May 3, at San Francisco Cooking School, Van Ness Ave. (Tenderloin); tickets are $ at sfcooking.com.

See what it is about Myanmar that so inspires Desmond Tan in these magical photos taken by SF photographer John Lee, on location for the Burma Superstar cookbook:

Mohinga is our national dish – a fragrant fish, lemongrass and rice noodle soup usually eaten for breakfast. It’s heaped with crispy split-pea fritters, slices of soft duck egg and bouncy fishcake, then scattered with roasted chilli flakes and shredded coriander leaves. Served with lime or lemon wedges to squeeze on top, it’s a perfect, balanced start to the day. Few people actually make mohinga at home, as there are countless street vendors and cafés vying for business, and everyone has their favourite.

Nan Gyi Thoke (also known as Mandalay Mont Di)is a hearty, warm salad of fat rice noodles, chicken or beef curry, chilli oil, toasted chickpea powder, coriander and sliced shallots.

Lahpet Thoke is probably our most iconic dish– made with pickled tea leaves (lahpet) mixed with crunchy nuts and beans, dried shrimp, sliced tomato and shredded white cabbage to create a piquant and savoury salad, bursting with flavour and textures. This is served at the end of most meals, but is also eaten as a snack or dished out when visitors come round.

A decade ago, it would be hard to imagine this level of excitement for a cuisine that barely registers in New York or Chicago. After quietly sustaining itself in a few local cities for decades, this year Burmese cuisine has taken to the road: To San Rafael. To Corte Madera. To San Ramon, Santa Clara and Millbrae. In December , contributors to the food website Chowhound counted 28 Bay Area Burmese restaurants — and that was a good five or six locations ago.

Since the coup d’etat that installed a military junta in Burma (Myanmar) led to many Burmese immigrating to the Bay Area, the local Burmese community now numbers in the tens of thousands, one of the largest in the nation.

The boom owes its existence to a few early arrivals who introduced the broader public to Burmese food in the early s, and then to the viral, if unexpected, success of Burma Superstar in the s. California’s Burmese cuisine is so dynamic and fast evolving that the food Melanie H. and Tyrone V. are thrilled to eat may not bear much resemblance to what cooks make in Burma or what some new restaurateurs are preparing.

In short: If you think you know what tea leaf salad tastes like, you haven’t been eating around.

'Where’s Burma?’

When Philip and Nancy Chu opened Nan Yang in Oakland Chinatown in , it might have been the first full-fledged Burmese restaurant in the Bay Area, if not the West Coast.

“I had people coming peeking through the window, looking at the place,” Philip Chu remembers 32 years later, in his early 80s. “Burma — where’s Burma? Then they walked away. Sometimes I had only one customer all night long.”

Yet Chu felt called to continue cooking the food of his home country — by a lifelong love of beauty, he says. He had grown up in the former capital city of Rangoon, a member of the middle-class Chinese community, and that same love had caused him to reject a scholarship to study nuclear physics in order to pursue architecture.

His work as an architect, for a member of the junta who was then ousted for his support of democracy, landed Chu in prison for 2½ years. He and his wife and children were allowed to leave Burma in on two conditions: They could never return, and they had to leave immediately, taking only $7 each with them. “I could not even tip the porter at the San Francisco airport when we arrived,” Chu says.

The Chus were among the scores of Chinese Burmese who trickled into the country in the late s, driven away by anti-Chinese riots and anti-intellectual persecution. Educated people with a skill, explains Myanmar Community USA Director Felix Chin, were readily given visas; others had to find a relative or a sponsor. Anyone with ties to the Bay Area’s Chinese community tapped them. Many new arrivals found support — jobs, English lessons, housing — from Chinatown immigrant groups.

Chu alternated between architecture work and restaurants — one a hofbrau renowned for its roast turkey — before he and Nancy opened Nan Yang. Sharing cooking duties, the two split the menu between Burmese and Chinese dishes. They inspired friends in the Burmese-Chinese community, Wayne and Tammy Lee, to open Mandalay in San Francisco's Richmond District six months later, where the Lees served a similar mix.

Yet both restaurants languished, Chu admits. Despite their resolve, the Chus began to fret that they’d made a mistake. Then, in , San Francisco Chronicle critic Stan Sesser reviewed Nan Yang, gushing over the ginger salad and coconut-chicken noodles. Chu ran out of most dishes by 8 p.m., despite preparing more food than he ever had after Sesser warned him a couple days in advance.

An era of hour-long waits had begun.

Most of the subsequent writers who came to the restaurant described Burmese food as the midpoint of Chinese, Indian and Thai cuisines, with mild curries, hearty soups and thrilling salads. Chu says that he refused to compromise on his recipes for American tastes. Yet there was one dish he declined to serve, thinking it too off-putting for outsiders, until a food writer who had read about the Burmese practice of fermenting tea leaves in buried containers requested a tea leaf salad.

Chu mixed one up, using leaves imported by a tiny market in Los Angeles and pulses and seeds he painstakingly soaked, roasted and fried. Other customers found out about the dish. Within a few years, tea leaf salad had surpassed ginger salad in popularity.

Nan Yang opened a second location on Rockridge in , closing the original location a few years later and retiring from the restaurant business in Across the bay, Mandalay sputtered along until , when its original owner sold to a family friend, a more talented cook.

Superstar saviors

Around the same time, Burma Superstar’s current owners Joycelyn Lee and partner Desmond Htunlin got into the restaurant business because they couldn’t imagine parting with their favorite place.

Languishing on a slow block of Clement Street, Burma Superstar was not much to look at in , with beer signs for atmosphere, a dining room gazebo consumed by plastic ivy and a near-perennially empty dining room. The owners had opened the restaurant in , but nine years in, they were exhausted and ready to sell.

Htunlin is Burmese-Chinese and Lee is Filipino-Chinese, so the two regular customers, then in their late 20s, were well acquainted with the cuisine. Lee says she remembers thinking. “If they close, where would we eat Burmese food? Burmese food is a lot of work.”

Their decision to sustain the restaurant — one of the owners stayed on as a waiter — took on new urgency one month later when Lee lost her graphic design job in the dot-com crash. Suddenly, she realized, “I have a lot of people working in the kitchen, and how are we going to pay them? So I started to do anything and everything to help it grow.”

Htunlin and Lee gradually took down the beer signs and replaced them with photographs. They removed the gazebo and the ugly wood paneling. They touched up the menu based on suggestions from the Burma-born cooks and waiters. There was a cold noodle dish, for instance, with 20 ingredients that Lee loved, but in Burmese it was called hand salad, and hand salad wasn’t going on the menu. So she renamed it Rainbow Salad, and the dish suddenly sold like crazy.

Lee can’t point to a moment when she felt assured of Burma Superstar’s success, but somewhere, around , the jostling in the dining room spilled onto the sidewalk. Local publications began touting the restaurant’s vegetarian samusa soup — a popular street food in Burma, Lee says — and customers couldn’t get enough of the coconut rice and the tea leaf salad, now made with added romaine lettuce for a lighter crunch.

In , Htunlin and Lee took over a friend’s flailing Alameda restaurant and turned it into a second Burma Superstar, then opened a third branch in Temescal in

Burma Superstar had become a phenomenon.

Setting the pace

In the wake of the phenomenon came Rangoon Rubys and Burma Houses and Pagans. Overflow from the Burma Superstar lines even helped transform the pace at nearby Mandalay from sleepy to manic.

Lee attributes today’s Burmese boom to changing tastes. “I think, in general, people are more interested in trying something new,” she says. “What’s new to them is traditional to Burma. You can bring on the fish sauce, bring on the shrimp paste. People are open to trying other people’s cuisines.”

Yet, as Burmese cuisine has settled into its new country, it has changed. How could it not? The vegetables sold at market are different. The Pacific Ocean yields different fish than Southeast Asian rivers.

The context in which we eat the food is different, too. Burma’s national dish, a pounded-fish stew called mohinga, is ladled into bowls at street corner stalls at all hours of the day; on Bay Area menus, it takes a demure place in the soup section. Here, curries aren’t set on the table with a profusion of bowls: rice, soup, raw and lightly cooked vegetables, pickles and relishes.

Most important, who eats the food is different.

“Real Burmese food,” says Myanmar Community USA Director Chin, “they use fish sauce a lot. But not many people can stand the smell. So they have to use it a little bit lighter, so non-Burmese people will come and eat it.”

There’s also a similarity between newer restaurants’ menus and Burma Superstar’s. You can see it at Shwe Myanmar in San Rafael, whose menu — rainbow salad, samusa soup and all — emulates the more established restaurant’s with the fierce devotion of a drag queen to her Beyonce cover.

Burmese food is becoming Burmese American food, just as what Americans consider Thai and Indian food congealed several decades before: a short canon of dishes popularized by early restaurants like Nan Yang, Mandalay and Burma Superstar, interspersed with Chinese American and Thai dishes. The prepackaged tea leaf salad you now find at grocery stores is a lettuce salad lightly flecked with dark green.

Who emigrates from Burma to America has changed as well. Given the ruling regime’s repression of the many ethnic groups — Karen, Shan, Chin, Kachin, Mon — the U.S. government has granted asylum to , new refugees since , many of whom have settled across the country. Northern California-bound immigrants find housing in Oakland or Union City instead of San Francisco. Instead of working on farms and in workshops in Burma, here they can become cooks and servers.

Free to experiment

We are entering a new phase: Bay Area diners have embraced Burmese food so enthusiastically that they have freed some restaurateurs to experiment.

William Lue exemplifies both aspects of the rush. After spending the s and ’80s in Chinese and Burmese restaurants, Lue left the industry until , when he launched a short-lived Burmese food truck that circulated in SoMa. A string of pop-ups and half-baked restaurants followed. Then Lue settled on an empire-building strategy: taking Burmese to the ’burbs.

Tapping into the flow of immigrant cooks to the East Bay, Lue opened the Refined Palate in Orinda in December , TW Burmese Gourmet in San Ramon in May , Grocery Cafe in East Oakland in March and Pacheco Bistro in Martinez three weeks ago.

All fit the designation “hole in the wall”: sparsely decorated restaurants in central but far from high-profile locations, each with a short introductory menu of classics like tea and ginger salads, mohinga, coconut-chicken noodles, and a few curries.

Lue, a man with so many plans that it’s hard to separate the ideal from reality, has even grander ambitions. He’s hoping to have Hmong farmers in Fresno grow Burmese vegetables like moringa (“drumstick tree”) and chinbong, the “sour leaf” that some restaurants stir-fry with shrimp, and to introduce the East Bay to rare Shan and Karen dishes. His cooks are already preparing rarities for groups who request them in advance, and Lue says he produces fermented fish paste, spicy dried anchovies and other fragrant condiments for customers who ask for “Burmese Burmese” food.

Lue isn’t alone. Some of the most distinctive Burmese food in San Francisco is coming from Wanna-E, a food truck that became street-legal just two months ago.

Wanna-E is run by a group of Burmese-Chinese friends in their 20s who arrived in the Bay Area in the mids. Manager William Lee and his sister, Coco, a recent culinary-school grad, teamed up with Zin Win and Rainy Shai because they wanted to introduce the food of Mandalay, the city where all four spent their early years.

“Mandalay is really diverse,” William Lee says. “A lot of immigrants have come there from China and Thailand, and our cuisine has already been shaped by this diverse culture.”

The four winnowed down their initial list of 50 dishes — all of which they hold in reserve for their restaurant, should they ever open one — down to a menu of 10 mobile-friendly offerings. It includes Chinese-Burmese noodles with braised pork and scads of fried garlic, and a Yunnanese mushroom noodle soup. A salad of crispy shredded pork with cabbage and lime is a dish the Lees’ grandmother concocted years ago.

Even their classics taste more vivid than the versions we’ve come to expect: Tea leaf salad thrums with the funk of squid sauce, and crisp-edged squares of split-pea “tofu” come with a tart, chile-laced tamarind dipping sauce that Lee says is ubiquitous in Mandalay.

“Our customers tell us it’s very different from Burmese dishes at other restaurants,” William Lee says. “That’s a good thing to hear.”

Burma Superstar is not maintaining the status quo, either. When Htunlin opened Burma Love in December, he replaced some of the staples with new dishes. Lee, too, says she has just returned from a Burmese voyage, inspired. New dishes may spin out of her trip, she says, as well as a series of pop-ups to raise money for school uniforms.

She also came home with a more profound sense of her restaurant’s reach after talking with a woman in Burma who runs a cooking school and community center.

Well into their discussion, the woman finally asked Lee where she was traveling from. San Francisco, Lee told her.

“Oh!” the woman exclaimed. “Burma Superstar!”

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: [email protected] Twitter: @jonkauffman

A guide to Burma by the bay

Here’s an opinionated, incomplete and highly personal guide to some of my favorite Burmese dishes from local restaurants.

Mandalay: California St., San Francisco; () www.mandalaysf.com. Lunch and dinner daily.

Pick the Burmese dishes out from the sugary Chinese American ones, and you will eat well: lettuce-free tea leaf salad, ginger salad, Mandalay special noodles (noodles with coconut, chicken and lime), kaw soi dok (cold noodles with fried shallots and tamarind dressing).

Burma Superstar: Clement St., San Francisco; () www.burmasuperstar.com. Lunch and dinner daily.

Samusa soup, rainbow salad, okra egg curry, platha with curry.

Wanna-E: Thisfood truck is often parked during lunchtime at the corner of Third and Harrison streets in San Francisco. Check www.wanna-e.com or http://twitter.com/wannaesf for locations.

Split-pea tofu, tea leaf salad, pork sung salad, chicken curry with coconut rice.

Little Yangon: Mission St., Daly City; () http://littleyangon.com. Lunch and dinner Monday, Wednesday-Friday; breakfast through dinner Saturday-Sunday.

Mohinga (fish-noodle soup), Indo-Burmese biryani and, if you’re inclined toward strong flavors, belachang (fried ground shrimp and chiles). One of the few Bay Area restaurants that does not stint on shrimp paste and fish sauce.

Grocery Cafe: 10th Ave., Oakland; () www.facebook.com/grocerycafe. Lunch and dinner Monday-Saturday.

Mohinga (fish-noodle soup), ginger salad, braised pork with pickled mango, and whatever daily specials that William Lue is testing out on customers.

Mingalaba: Burlingame Ave., Burlingame; () www.mingalabarestaurant.com. Lunch and dinner daily.

Mingalaba is owned by the same family behind Mandalay, and the menu is similar. Food Editor Miriam Morgan, a regular customer, recommends ong noh kaw soi (coconut milk chicken soup), tea leaf salad, pan-fried okra prawns and house special noodles (with coconut, split peas and lime leaf).

— Jonathan Kauffman, [email protected]