Boisterous Burmese flavours tempt diners

Located in the space that was once home to an average Nepalese restaurant, The Burman Kitchen boasts a menu that is impossible not to over-order from. It's exciting (and dangerous) to see a list of dishes that your brain can't imagine the taste of.

Like an explorer, or a kid trying to select which ice-cream to choose from the enormous service station freezer, you've gotta try them all.

Your average diner (that's me!) has no idea what Burmese food is, and owner Lay Lay Naing is aware of this. Before she opened The Burman Kitchen last year, Naing was a retail manager who was famous for her cooking in Sydney's Burmese community.

Of all people, it was Manu Feildel who convinced Naing to open her own restaurant when she randomly encountered the reality TV chef.

Bored with the retail life, Naing needed a change. "I started thinking – am I happy in my work? I've been doing this so long. I was thinking, what am I doing?"

Upon hearing that Naing wanted to open her own restaurant, Feildel's initial reaction was "No! No!", but after hearing how passionate she was, he gave her a few tips for starting her new business. Within a week, Naing had quit her job and was busy recruiting for The Burman Kitchen.

She didn't have to look very far. Her sister-in-law Tin Tin Khine had been a chef at St George Golf Club for more than a decade and helped Naing refine her home-style recipes to a restaurant standard. Naing's daughter wrote the vivid menu and her son runs the restaurant's social media.

Almost every one of these people greet you at some point during your meal and the welcoming atmosphere only encourages you to add more dishes to your ridiculously big order.

Mohinga, a fish-based soup with vermicelli, is considered the national dish of Burma but it doesn't sound anywhere near as exciting as a pickled tea leaf salad, so we get that instead, and enjoy the crunch of the dried peas and nuts that are surrounded by the fermented tea paste.

A case could be made that both this and the crispy school prawn salad aren't really salads at all but after tasting the pungent, slightly spicy tamarind sauce that clings to the clumps of excellently fried school prawns you'll happily forget all salads you encountered before these ones.

Naing's proudest of her beef curry, a boisterous dish that we're barely able to eat a spoon of because we also ordered the wonderful shan noodles with chicken mince, soy bean paste and mustard pickles, and how could we go past an entree of crisply battered gourd, onion and azuki beans! 

As we finally roll ourselves out of the restaurant, Naing walks an enormous bamboo woven tray full of colourful rice, meats and vegetables to the table next to us.

Mouths agape, we're informed that these are called "zakor htamin", a traditional dish of one of the many ethnic groups within Burma.

"The whole family would go out for farming work and they come back for a lunch that their grandmother or mother prepares for them," Naing tells me proudly.

"Instead of one dish each, there's a lot of people, so she puts it all in one tray. Grab it, share it, that's how they do the family meal."

You can pre-order zakor by calling The Burman Kitchen the morning before your booking.

Which is absolutely what we're doing when we return there next week. And the week after that.

Other restaurants where you can try Burmese food in Sydney

Golden Myanmar Restaurant

36 Derbyshire Ave, Toongabbie, 02 9631 5545

Sun's Burmese Kitchen

10 Tulloch St, Blacktown, 02 9676 2837