Burma Restaurant, Washington, D.C.

On our shopping trip to Chinatown Friday night, Laurent wanted dinner before we went to the store. Well, Chinatown has a wide variety of restaurants, though the number of national chains is fast outpacing the number of Chinese and even Asian restaurants in the now high-rent area surrounding the Verizon Center (the "sports" arena).

We walked down to the far end of "China Block" and around the corner, where there are some nice, non-touristy places. We chose Burma Restaurant.

Burma is one of the long-time neighborhood restaurants there, and, as one might guess from the name, it features Burmese food. Burma/Myanmar isn't a well-known country around here. It's sandwiched between India and Thailand, with substantial coastline on the Bay of Bengal.

The restaurant is on the second floor of a building, over a well-financed Thai restaurant that recently moved to Chinatown. Burma, though, has been around for a decade or two. The decor is spare, with closely spaced, simple tables and chairs in a fairly small main dining room (there appears to be a back room, too, but it wasn't in use). Photographs of Burma adorn the walls.

The menu is small by typical Asian restaurant standards, but there were still quite a few more interesting items on the list than we were able to try.

We started with Golden Triangles, made from seasoned potatoes wrapped in what seemed a bit like phyllo dough, and then deep fried. It came with a sweet sauce with an ample pour of red chile sauce in it.



For main courses, Ian had chicken curry with potatoes. It was a yellow curry with a lot of chicken still on the bone in the dish. It's the dish above in the foreground. I had the sautéed squid. It's the dish in the background. It was surprisingly good. The squid had been decoratively scored and cut, then tossed with scallions, ginger, and garlic and served with a little bit of brown broth; bits of tasty country ham added an unexpected rich note.



Dessert was intriguing. We split the Burmese coconut cream cake, and what we got was totally unexpected. The dish bore two triangles of cake made from, of all things, Cream of Wheat, with rice flour, palm sugar, and coconut milk. It had a denser, grainier texture than a normal cake, and reminded me somewhat of cornbread. A small dollop of whipped cream and a matching dollop of ice cream accompanied the cakes.

Along with my meal, I had a very pleasant Burmese hot tea. Ian had a Coke.

Sorry about the photo quality in this entry. I didn't know we were going to be eating out, so I didn't bring my camera, and we had to use Ian's cell phone.

Burma is a place I'll definitely visit again. Service was inobtrusive and adequate. The food was light and simple, yet bursting with complex flavors, and, best of all, the prices were cheap and the serving size large.