Mixed up at Mingalaba

July 2nd, 2008 · No Comments

The Burmese sure love to mix things up. Seriously, at a Chowhound lunch at Mingalaba, almost every dish we ordered involved tableside mixing. It’s nice for once to have some idea of what ingredients are in an exotic and unfamiliar dish, but what’s with the national passion for blending?

Chowhound poster Moomin once wrote:

“Thoke” is an important syllable to toss about freely when composing a Burmese menu. The word means “mix.” Anything in which a variety of ingredients are mixed can be a “thoke.”

Salad is a thoke. An ice-cream sundae is a thoke. Fried rice, given enough ingredients, could be a thoke. You get the idea.

In Burma there is no specific cultural tradition of a mixed green salad. But, in Burmese American restaurants there is ALWAYS a salad section on the menu. In these cases what is generally being served is a wide selection of thoke.

Fermented tea leaf salad is just this kind of thoke, closer to Indian chaat than anything from an American salad bar. Mingalaba’s version surprised me at first, using ground tea leaves instead of the whole ones I’d had at Golden Triangle in southern California. Pungently sour and funky, it’s not for the faint of heart, but in moderate doses it’s quite tasty.

Young ginger salad, shown at top, is more clean-flavored and refreshing.

I first heard about this place from my friend Daveena, who raved about the palatha (aka, in other parts of the world, paratha or roti). I adore these rich, flaky pancakes and sometimes buy frozen packages of them from the Thai supermarket to pan-cook at home, even though they’re inevitably as thick as a dinner plate.

Mingalaba’s palatha is really wonderful, flaky and tissue-delicate. The bottom sauce is a lovely coconut milk curry, the top is like Indian dal but not very flavorful.

The big surprise was how a shrimp, garlic and chile condiment I’d never heard of could transform ordinary green beans into a thing of deliciousness. Balachaung! The word is like music to my tongue. Long after the green beans were eaten, I was picking crispy bits of fried spice paste off the plate and eating them.