A lesson in Burmese cuisine How do you judge a cuisine you don’t know?  Kyain Kyain, a Burmese restaurant in a strip mall in Fremont, presented a challenge that bore lessons beyond the plate. 

A lesson in Burmese cuisine How do you judge a cuisine you don’t know?  Kyain Kyain, a Burmese restaurant in a strip mall in Fremont, presented a challenge that bore lessons beyond the plate. 

Before I moved to San Francisco, this is what I knew about Burmese food: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, not much.  I’m not proud of that fact, but I do think it’s important to be honest and lay out my cards from the outset — to admit that an important and unseen part of being a restaurant critic is researching all of the cuisines I don’t know and filling in the gaps as best as I can.  I don’t have to know everything about every cuisine to judge whether a restaurant experience is a good one, but it certainly helps to appreciate its context.  I read, a lot.  My self-education also involved going to as many of the local highlights as I could, with the hope of collecting data points.  I waited in line at Burma Superstar, trekked out to Rangoon Ruby in Palo Alto, squeezed into Yamo and checked out a few others. 

Some patterns emerged.  Burmese triangular samosas had similar fillings as their Indian counterparts, but were encased in thin spring roll wrappers and served in soups and salad; there is a stark cabbage versus lettuce divide in tea leaf salads; and the cuisine’s “curries” are a colonizer’s misnomer, bearing only a fleeting resemblance to the Indian or Thai dishes that exist under that umbrella. 

The roasted garlic noodles with chicken at Kyain Kyain restaurant in Fremont, Calif, on Saturday, April 20, 2019.  The roasted garlic noodles with chicken at Kyain Kyain restaurant in Fremont, Calif, on Saturday, April 20, 2019.  Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close You know nothing, Soleil Ho: At Kyain Kyain in Fremont, a lesson in Burmese cuisine 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

Another important thing to do when you don’t know: Ask a friend.  So I reached out to Burmese food expert MiMi Aye, whose book, “Mandalay: Recipes & Tales From a Burmese Kitchen” (Bloomsbury), is due for release in August, to impart what she loves about the cuisine. 

“Burmese food is a feast for the senses,” she emailed. “ The aroma from a bubbling pot of pork and green mango curry; the vision of a rainbow salad of rice, carrots and coriander; the crackle and crunch of a handful of split pea fritters; and the sensation of noodles silky with turmeric chicken sauce.”  Sour and umami are the most prominent flavors in Burmese dishes, she explained, and in her words, “textural contrast is essential.” 

During my Bay Area research, the Burmese restaurant that stuck out the most, with both great service and food, was Kyain Kyain in Fremont’s Sunset Village strip mall. ( Aye told me that the name rhymes with “fine,” with the “ky” pronounced “halfway between a J and a Ch.”  So, “Jine Jine.”)  If one were to have a progressive meal through the shops in the very beige building that is Sunset Village, it would also include boba tea, lumpia, steamed monkfish liver, tofu soup and taco pizza. 

The Kyain Kyain menu is a straightforward collection of salads, brothy soups, noodles and curries —pure comfort food, something confirmed by super fans on Facebook who praise the restaurant for its nostalgia factor. 

Kyain Kyain does feel like a home, even though it’s not my own.  The coral pink walls are adorned with earnest abstract paintings, framed photos of Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and a Buddhist shrine.  Though there’s no music playing in the dining room proper, one can sometimes hear the plaintive strains of Burmese country music leak out of the kitchen. 

Mona Naing, who commands the front of house, is easy to talk to: She often pauses to find just the right word to explain something in English, clearly flipping through a mental dictionary.  Sometimes, a gang of older women takes up the back table of the restaurant to do side work.  On one visit, they giggled wickedly as Naing treated my table to a sample of off-menu shrimp cakes that had been fermented for 40 hours. ( Trip report: similar to tart lemon bars, but shrimp.) 

The lahpet thoke (tea leaf salad, $9.99) is the best of the Bay Area.  At Kyain Kyain, it comes already mixed, made with julienned green cabbage, halved grape tomatoes, dried shrimp, toasted legumes and seeds and tossed with fish sauce.  The first time I had it, I noticed a pleasant, tongue-coating flavor that I couldn’t quite figure out.  It was kind of cheesy, in the way that nutritional yeast aims to be.  Chickpea powder, Naing later told me.  That same chickpea flour, or besan, caused the dressing that coated the noodle salad ($7.99) to taste uncannily like Kraft mac and cheese, activating a childhood association that made eating it incredibly pleasurable. 

By contrast, the samosa salad ($8.99), while beautiful in appearance, wasn’t so fun to eat.  The mixture of samosa pieces, raw onion slices, fried shallot and cilantro was heavy on cilantro stems, which impart a much stronger flavor than the leaves alone.  That, coupled with a cloying tamarind-based dressing, overloaded my senses.  Maybe if I could chase it with a hoppy beer I could do it, but alas — Kyain Kyain only offers teas. 

Kyain Kyain Location: 3649 Thornton Ave.,  Fremont. ( 510) 574-1819 or www.kyainkyainfremont.com Hours: Lunch and dinner, Tuesday-Sunday.  Accessibility: No steps.  Good wheelchair access to tables.  Gender-neutral restrooms.  Noise level: On the low end; no music.  Meal for two, sans drinks: $25-$40.  What to order: Tea leaf salad, samosas ($7.99), yellow rice or paratha with chicken curry, noodle salad, pork bone soup.  Plant-based options: Sparse; look out for the vegetable curry that is sometimes a special.  Drinks: Nonalcoholic only.  Transportation: Parking lot.  Off the 251 AC Transit line; a short walk from the 99 AC Transit line.  Best practices: Recently began accepting credit cards. 

Like pho joints, Kyain Kyain provides each table with an assortment of condiments for soup customization: sesame oil, fish sauce, hot sauce, dried chiles and white pepper.  I did like that you could order a few tablespoons of fried chile mixed with dried shrimp for $1, a piquant condiment perfect for stirring into your otherwise-subtle pork bone soup ($5.99) or mohinga ($7.99), fish soup with noodles. ( Naing confided to me that she likes to eat the chile mix on bread, so for a week after that visit I sprinkled my leftovers onto bagels with cream cheese and was very happy about it.) 

The chicken curry ($10.99) here was the oiliest I’ve had yet.  I’ll be honest — there was a split second where my French technique-trained mind thought, something’s wrong!  But then I remembered a story that Nigerian-born chef-writer Tunde Wey told about making palm nut soup at one of his pop-ups: The restaurant’s chef walked by and grimaced at the thick layer of orange oil floating at the top of the pot, remarking that it had separated and that he’d better start over.  But in truth, that’s how it was supposed to be. 

It’s a similar tale in Burmese food. “ The most famous Burmese cooking technique is see-pyan, meaning ‘the oil returns,’” Aye said. “ It’s a way of cooking a curry down so much that the oil first disappears into the sauce and then rises back up.”  For Burmese diners, the saucier the curry, the better — anything to make the most of it as a condiment on vegetables, rice and bread. 

I used the flaky, flat paratha to mix the oil into the gravy beneath it; in between bites, I dipped a fork into the side dish of raw onion and cucumber slivers, the taste of which rang through the curry’s fattiness like the triangle in Wagner’s Bridal Chorus.  Unsurprisingly, this is a dish that will fill you up to a full KO.  I would order it again — and clear out my appointments for a few hours afterwards. 

Sometimes I get notes from Chronicle readers who are put off by menus with dishes they can’t pronounce, whose fear of confusion keeps them from trying out restaurants — often those run by recent immigrants.  They tell me that they refuse to order dishes whose names they’ve never spoken aloud, so many of my reviews are useless to them. ( I should note here that these correspondents never complain about French or Italian terminology like “coq au vin” or “spaghetti.”) 

I hate to think that unpronounceability could present such a major barrier to the enjoyment of delicious food.  It shouldn’t be shameful to learn words in other languages, because at least you’re trying.  Stumbling through unfamiliar syllables might be new to someone who is used to having a default perspective, but it’s something that so many newcomers to this country have had to do every day since coming here. 

It’s OK to mispronounce things.  It’s OK to ask questions if you don’t know.  You don’t have to be an expert in everything, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep learning.  Think of what you’d be missing out on!  I still stumble over “lahpet thoke,” but I can endure some embarrassment for a version as unforgettable as Kyain Kyain’s. 

Soleil Ho is The San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic.  Email: soleil.ho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hooleil