Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
YANGON STREET FOOD
Large parts of downtown Yangon often resemble an enormous outdoor café, especially
after dark, when every available piece of pavement seems to fill up with
food stalls
and crowds of locals perched around low-slung tables on tiny child-sized plastic chairs.
Burmesecurriesandnoodlesareubiquitous,whilehotpot(
kyay-oh
)isanotherlocalfavour-
ite, with diners seated around vats of bubbling water in which they cook their own slivers
of meat and vegetables. Also worth seeking out is the local
samusa thote
- slices of sam-
osa served in a minty salad. Food stalls are often interleaved with market stalls piled high
with vegetables and colourful tropical fruit, plus mobile vendors sitting behind enormous
mangling machines selling glasses of freshly crushed cane sugar - a popular local bever-
age.
The most popular street-food experience among tourists is on
19th Street
in Chinatown
where you can snack to your heart's content on everything from pig's ears and glutinous
sausages to chicken wings, crunchy tofu and lots of seafood. Most of the pavement venues
here are actually extensions of the various cafés lining the road rather than proper food
stalls, although the grub is excellent and the beer's cheap and plentiful (unlike the city's
traditional food stalls, which only serve tea and soft drinks). The cafés here now spill out
intoMahabandoolaRoad,whichislinedwithfurtherfoodstallsandmarketstandsoffering
up some of the city's more outlandish foodstuffs - including deep-fried locusts, deep-fried
snakes, severed duck heads and assorted pieces of pig.
Elsewhere in the city,
Anawrahta Road
is arguably the king of food streets, particularly
around the junction with Sule Pagoda Road (which also boasts dozens of food stalls after
dark in the area north of the pagoda - the cluster of stalls outside
Takafuji
serve up a good
spread of local curries and are well used to dealing with blundering foreigners). The sec-
tions of Anawrahta Road around the Sri Devi and Sri Kali temples also boast stalls selling
Indian nibbles including the inevitable samosas and other deep-fried snacks, as well as
shops loaded with traditional Indian sweets, including
rasmalai
,
jalebi
and
gulab jamun
.
A few places (such as
Shwe Bali
, on Anawrahta Road just west of Sule Pagoda) also sell
deliciouslassis,whileelsewhereyoumightfindanotherclassicsubcontinentalcocktail,fa-
looda - a kind of fluorescent milky concoction loaded with bits of fruit and jelly.
One major caveat applies, however:
hygiene
. A study in early 2014 revealed that over a
third of food tested from Yangon street stalls contained
Staphylococcus aureus
and
Bacil-
lus cereus
bacteria, both of which can lead to food poisoning (and a quarter of the samples
contained these bacteria in dangerously high levels). Choosing busy stalls where food ap-
pearstobehotandfreshlypreparedmayhelpreducerisks,asdoespatronizingstallswhere
vendors use plastic gloves rather than scooping food up with their bare hands. The major
underlyingfactors-utensilswashedindirtywaterandpoorfoodhygieneandstorage-are
