Rangoon Bistro’s unique take on Burmese food: ‘not the way my mom or grandma cooks’

Editor’s note: This week and next, we’re counting down our favorite new Portland restaurants of 2022. At No. 9: Rangoon Bistro, a Burmese restaurant that draws influences from some unexpected places.

To wrap your head around Rangoon Bistro’s uniquely comforting approach to Burmese food, it helps to know that co-owners David Sai and Alex Saw met while working at an upscale Italian restaurant in Malaysia.

What does that mean? Well, if you happen to order a wheat noodle dish, Saw might boil the noodles, then finish them in a sauté pan with their own starchy water, creating a pleasant slick using a technique more commonly seen in Southern Italy. It also means the longtime friends — plus third partner Nick Sherbo, the only partner not born in the country also known as Myanmar — are comfortable including Malaysian-style fried chicken on a menu that otherwise reads traditionally Burmese.

“This isn’t the way my mom or grandma cooks,” Saw says. “The flavors are the same, but the technique is much different.”

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While working at Bollywood Theater, where the three cooks first met six years ago, Sai and Saw sometimes prepared Burmese food for their coworkers. So when the duo told Sherbo about their plans to open a restaurant, he had no idea they meant an Italian one.

“I think they thought people didn’t want Burmese food because there weren’t any Burmese restaurants here at the time,” Sherbo said. “But there we were standing at Bollywood Theater, and there were 200 people in line waiting to eat samosas. It seemed obvious to me that it would be well received.”

Rangoon Bistro launched as a farmer’s market stand in 2017, serving tea leaf salads and coconut curries to customers at Northeast Portland’s King Farmers Market. By 2019, they were ready to launch a pop-up series at venues such as Langbaan, Malka and Bollywood Theater’s Churchgate Station.

Those farm ties are still strong at the restaurant, which opened on Southeast 50th Avenue in March. When in season, local squash might be used in a dish that would typically feature mango. And Rangoon Bistro buys all the tea leaves for its tea leaf salads from Salem’s Minto Island Farms, adding an extra layer of time-intensive prep.

“It’s a hassle to do it that way, but it ultimately tastes better, and it’s way better for the planet,” Sherbo said. “They deliver it to us. But it’s still a lot. Just imagine 40 pounds of leaves.”

Five years after the trio first teamed up, Burmese food is no longer unknown in Portland. Today, the city claims several carts exploring the cuisine of Myanmar, which blends influences from India, China and Thailand, as well as a small chain, Top Burmese, that was a best new restaurant honoree last year. (Funnily enough, one cart, Burmese Delight, closed its location just down the road from Rangoon Bistro earlier this year, replaced by perhaps the only falafel cart in the world with images of water buffalo, a Buddha and a Myanmar sunset on the side).

Owing to their diverse culinary backgrounds, food at Rangoon Bistro resembles little else in Portland. The bone-in fried chicken is inspired by Sai and Saw’s time in Malaysia, which explains the similarity to the popular Southern Thai fried chicken at Hat Yai. Only here the marinade of lemongrass, curry leaf and mild red chiles adds deep flavor to a crunchy bird more reminiscent of American fried chicken, with juices that flow down your chin from the first bite.

Found at the Breathe Building, a health and movement center best known for its yoga classes, Rangoon Bistro’s current menu is perfect for cold evenings, with slurpable noodles, coconut rice and deceptively decadent curries. But summer will bring the return of the restaurant’s khao pyan sane, a giant dumpling stuffed with veggies or pork, as well as warm evenings perfect for easy-drinking tamarind Pegu Clubs sipped on the sprawling front patio.

Burma? Malaysia? Italy?

Wherever it comes from, it feels like home.

What to order: Pork shank noodles, fried chicken and a Pegu Club, and keep an eye out for specials.

Details: Rangoon Bistro is open for dinner Wednesday to Sunday and lunch on weekends at 2311 S.E. 50th Ave., 503-953-5385, rangoonbistropdx.com

Read more: Portland’s best new restaurants of 2022

— Michael Russell; mrussell@oregonian.com

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