In Myanmar, you can eat your tea. The country is unusual in the tea drinking world for its laphet, or fermented tea leaves, that are eaten, often tossed into a salad with tomatoes, garlic, chillies, sesame or peanuts. Tea is food here in a very literal sense. And the tea shop, where cups of sweet, milky laphet yay (traditional Burmese milk tea) arrive alongside breads, curries and fried snacks, has long been one of the most ordinary and important rooms in Burmese life.
There might be a retired teacher catching up with an old colleague at one table, students sharing homework at another, and monks or street hawkers eating breakfast at another. A football match might even play on television.
Hot and cold teas from the menu
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Special Arrangement
Myanmar’s tea shops have traditionally been democratic pockets for conversations, sweet rendezvous, arguments, making plans and exchanging opinions. The Myanmar Tea Association describes them as a kind of “parliament of the common people”.
It is this everyday world that Burma Burma is attempting to bring to the table this August with PaukSe & Palata: Windows to Burma, a limited edition menu devoted to the humble tea shop staples of Burma. The menu, available till August 31 across Burma Burma’s restaurants in Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Hyderabad, is also available through Swiggy and Zomato.
The menu takes that familiar grammar and gives it a contemporary Indian restaurant’s vocabulary. There are three paukse, four palata preparations, desserts, Burmese pulled teas and house made sodas. But the more interesting proposition is cultural: to understand a country through one of its everyday rituals followed by its common people.
Ankit Gupta, co-founder, Burma Burma
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Special Arrangement
Co-founder Ankit Gupta and chef and director, Culinary Operations, Ansab Khan explain that in Burma, the culture of restaurants is not prevalent. People gather around the food of the tea shop rather than restaurants, which are anyway few.
Chef and director, Culinary Operations, Ansab Khan
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Special Arrangement
The idea behind the limited menu came from the monsoon. Tea shops are where food changes according to the hour. Breakfast has its own dishes, lunch becomes heavier and by evening, the food shifts towards snacking and drinking.
Chef Ansab explains, “Palata is made from ordinary maida flour, yet its preparation can be anything but ordinary. Burmese palata originated from the Indian subcontinent, evolving directly from the South Indian parotta or “paratha” as it is called in Hindi. It travelled to Myanmar through historical trade and the Indian diaspora, eventually transforming into a lighter, layered, and slightly sweeter street food staple found in local tea shops.”
The Burmese palata takes after the South Indian parotta
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Special Arrangement
In true Burmese spirit
The food arrives in the spirit of a Burmese tea shop: The khow suey, a light coconut-milk noodle dish traditionally eaten for breakfast, is paired here with Burma Burma’s cold teas like the sea salt honeycomb, finished with lemon mousse and honeycomb, and the jasmine rice and brown sugar, layered with brown sugar jelly and soft cheese foam.
For the hot tea, the pistachio and saffron pulled tea arrives thick, milky, well boiled and anointed with the sweet and subtle flavour of saunf and star anise, with pistachio butter lending it a rich, brown, earthy flavour.
The OG Burmese Taco turns the classic keema palata into a handheld bite, with spicy minced mock meat and chilli garlic butter.
There is a technique in Burma where the dough is stretched and folded until it can be inflated into a huge balloon, trapping air between the layers before it is cooked. The result is a bread that shatters and flakes when torn. Chef Ansab explains the process.
The team travelled to Burma to learn the technique. Chef Ansab says, “We did a three day course just to learn how to flip palata and tea making in Burma: typical techniques of flipping it.”
Burmese khow suey, tacos and cream puffs and pistachio saffron pulled tea are highlights from the menu
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Special Arrangement
The tea is pulled between vessels, mixed from different forms of tea and finished according to the drinker’s preference. There are varying degrees of milk and sweetness. There is salt. There is condensed milk. The making of it is part of the pleasure. Ankit explains, “They mix three different types of tea together. One is the black tea, one is slightly cooked or roasted black tea, and they give it with a slight pinch of salt and condensed milk. It’s very, very unique.”
Tea shop food and hawker style food
Ankit says that the distinction between a tea shop and a roadside hawker stall is worth making. A hawker might specialise in noodles, salads and snacks. The tea shop is more of a gathering place. There is another detail that says something about Burmese eating habits. Meals are often small and frequent. The idea of eating three large meals at fixed times is hardly universal.
Ankit says, “In Burma, it’s 16 meals a day.” Food appears often, in small portions, across the day. Noodles can turn up at breakfast, lunch or dinner. A tea shop is always a plausible place to stop.
Chef Ansab mentions, “ Generally people going for their early morning jobs would stop at a tea shop, have their bowl of mohinga, or a khow suey, or a palata, like a good meal, and then move on.”
Burmese sandwiches and burgers from the menu
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Special Arrangement
Getting there took time. The restaurant’s team made multiple trips to Burma, built relationships with local suppliers and spent years understanding the ingredients. Ankit says, “To open a restaurant, we require, in different categories, around 50 to 60 dishes. So it took us three to four years, multiple visits to Burma, to get the supply chain also sorted.”
The maternal side of Ankit’s family is from Burma and his mother was born and raised there. He says, “A lot of the ingredients you see at Burma were maybe imported from Burma. And chef Ansab is from India, but now part Burmese, since he has had about 18 visits in the last nine years,” laughs Ankit.
Items from the imited edition menu
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Special Arrangement
The food also reveals something else about Burma: its relationship with vegetarian cooking. Although predominantly non vegetarian, the country has a strong repertoire of vegetable dishes and periods when many people abstain from meat and alcohol during the Buddhist Lent. That has allowed Burma Burma to interpret dishes without simply replacing meat with vegetables.
For one month, Burma Burma is attempting to recreate a little of Burma offering a glimpse of tea shops on streets that continue to sustain people through years of conflict. It is a small window into a cuisine shaped by history, migration and resilience.
Burma Burma , Kolkata is located at 18 M, Ground Floor, Stephen Court, Park Street, Kolkata. Items are available for lunch and dinner. PaukSe items are priced at ₹450 each, Palata ₹450 each, beverages: ₹320–₹380, and desserts ₹400 each. An average meal for two costs ₹1,800 .
