The name of this column is a little awkward this week, because Burmese Bites does not take reservations. It is walk-in only. If there is a wait (Grub Street found a crowd of ten on the sidewalk one September evening), the owner takes your number and you stand on 31st Avenue in Astoria with everyone else.
That is fitting for a restaurant whose whole history has been a line. Before the room at 38-01 31st Avenue opened this summer, Burmese Bites was a stand at a church fair, a pop-up, a fixture of the Queens Night Market and a counter in a mall food court. Now it has four walls, a handful of tables and reviews from just about every critic in town. In a city that has never had many Burmese restaurants, that is news.
The Backers
There are no backers in the usual sense. Burmese Bites belongs to a married couple. Grub Street’s Matthew Schneier reported in September that Rebecca Nant runs the kitchen. Her husband, Myo Lin Thway, oversees the dining room “like a T-shirt clad ambassador, taking names, delivering dishes, spieling spiel.”
The family’s history in the business has been told two ways. According to Grub Street, it was in 2014 that Burmese Bites “graduated from a stand at Glendale’s Myanmar Baptist Church Fun Fair to a series of Manhattan pop-ups,” then to the Queens Night Market and the food court at Queens Center in Elmhurst. The Infatuation headlined its review as the payoff of “the 30-year wait,” and speaks of the operation as legendary since 1995. We print both. The two accounts may describe different chapters of the same family’s cooking rather than a contradiction.
In The New York Times, Ligaya Mishan framed the restaurant as one couple’s mission to bring Burmese food to New York. She noted that Thway learned to make palata as a teenager in Hinthada, on the Irrawaddy. The restaurant states its own mission on its front window: to share the taste of Burma with the world.
The Room
By every account, the décor has not entirely left the mall. Schneier found “cheerful yellow-and-purple accent walls” and judged that the room “still reads ‘food court.’” He also noticed a peafowl, Myanmar’s national bird, etched onto the window. The Infatuation’s Sonal Shah called the place scrappy, noting piles of pots and floral teacups. Eater mentions colorful ceramics and “quick, kind service.”
The neighbors are less exotic. Grub Street places it down the block from a Tiger Schulmann’s and a Banana Republic Factory store. The dining room is the sort of place where, as Schneier described it, families share platters of curry beside couples on dates.
The Menu, and What It Costs
The published menu is long, cheap and specific, and it is the best argument for the place.
- To start: appetizers run $8 to $11. Pat tote, fried chicken wontons with tamarind sauce, is $10 for a dozen. A kyaw sone, assorted vegetable fritters, is $11 at dinner.
- Palata: the flaky flatbread costs $4 plain and $13 with chicken curry or stuffed with spiced ground chicken. The menu describes the dough as “swung up and slapped down repeatedly until it can’t be stretched any thinner.”
- Salads: all $16, led by lahpet thoke, the fermented tea-leaf salad.
- Noodles: every bowl is $16. That includes mohinga, which the menu calls “Burma’s national dish,” and ohno kaukswe, the coconut-chicken noodle soup.
- Shareable dishes come with rice. Chicken curry is $18, beef $20, nga hin (fish curry) $20, shrimp $21 and crispy eel $26.
- Desserts are $5 to $8, Burmese tea $4 and sodas $2. There is no alcohol.
Here is a discrepancy worth printing. Grub Street wrote that “no entrée is more than $27,” and The Infatuation said that keeping every dish below $27 “feels almost heroic.” The restaurant’s own online menu lists the goat curry, hseik tha hin, at $28. The menu may have moved since the reviews ran, or the critics may have been counting differently. Either way, the top of the bill is $27 or $28, depending on which source you trust.
The menu also lists lunch rice combinations, served 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at $16 to $18, and dinner versions at $17 to $19. The posted hours, however, show dinner only, Monday through Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m. Grub Street reported in September that the restaurant served dinner only for now but planned to expand to all-day service. Call before you plan on lunch.
The Consensus
The critics are unusually united, and unusually warm.
The Times opened with a sentence any restaurateur would frame: “Palata is one of the world’s great flatbreads.” Grub Street described the lahpet thoke as “bright, crunchy cabbage leaves that go mulchy and rich when slicked with fermented green tea.” Schneier also praised the baby-goat curry, “with its dark, almost coffeelike bitter heat,” and the mohinga, in which catfish “dissolves to lend a mysterious and invisible richness.”
The Infatuation rated the restaurant an 8, which on its scale is “Great.” Shah recommended the keema palata, a kyaw sone, lahpet thoke, ngapi with vegetables, the ohn no kaukswe, nga hin, mohinga, shwe kyi and a rose-syrup shaved ice. Eater’s must-orders overlap almost perfectly, adding the crispy eel.
The nga hin comes with a story. Grub Street reported that the menu lists it as Thway’s favorite. “I don’t know what’s in it,” he told Schneier. “My wife makes it — I just take the credit.”
There is one reservation, so to speak. Schneier found that the dishes “can occasionally lean mild.” He noted that each table has a jar of chile flakes and a cruet of fish sauce, so diners can adjust the heat and funk to taste.
Our Judgment
Here is the column’s view of the record.
Burmese Bites is the rare restaurant where the critical consensus and the arithmetic point the same way. Four outlets with very different temperaments (the Times, Grub Street, The Infatuation and Eater) arrived at the same short list of dishes and the same affection for the people serving them. Almost everything on the menu costs $16 to $20, in a city where that buys a mediocre sandwich and a sparkling water.
The objections in the record are modest. The room is plain, and the wait is real. Some palates will reach for the chile flakes. None of them goes to the cooking.
There is also a larger point. As Schneier noted, there are nearly as many Burmese and Burmese American New Yorkers as Thai ones, yet the city has perhaps a hundred pad see ews for every lahpet thoke. A family that spent years feeding people at fairs, markets and a mall has finally built a room. By the evidence, it is one of the most rewarding places to eat cheaply in the city right now.
The Particulars
- Verdict: Highly recommended, on the strength of the record.
- Price: $. Appetizers $8–$11; palata $4–$13; salads and noodles $16; shareable curries with rice $18–$28 (the goat curry is listed at $28 on the restaurant’s menu, while critics put the ceiling at $27); desserts $5–$8; Burmese tea $4. No alcohol.
- Address: 38-01 31st Avenue, Astoria, Queens. (917) 560-2480.
- Hours: Posted as Monday through Saturday, 5 to 9 p.m.; closed Sunday. The menu also lists an 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. lunch; confirm by phone.
- Reservations: None. Walk-in only; if there is a wait, your number is taken. Takeout is available through the restaurant’s site.
Reservations weighs menus, prices, the published record and the critical consensus; when our critic has dined, we say so. Our critic did not dine at Burmese Bites for this review.
Featured image: Mohinga and tea-leaf salad, photographed at A Nyar Tar, a Burmese restaurant in Bentley, Western Australia, not at Burmese Bites. Photo by Orderinchaos via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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