Pagan: Vibrant Burmese cuisine
By: Patricia Unterman
Special to The Examiner
October 16, 2008
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The fresh salads at Pagan are among the many menu highlights that combine different ingredients and techniques. (Special to The Examiner)
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SAN FRANCISCO — Pagan, the new Burmese restaurant located about a mile due west of the wildly popular Burma Super Star restaurant, shows why Burmese cooking has become such a rage in San Francisco.
Burma shares a border and a sea with India, and spices, curries, rice dishes and dals have traveled back and forth. When Southeast Asian noodles, salads and Chinese vegetables are thrown into the mix, the Burmese kitchen embodies “fusion” — a historical, tradition-based melding of ingredients and techniques that has yielded a saucy, spicy, buoyant cuisine.
Burma also has a long geographical border with Thailand, and half of Pagan’s menu is Thai. Though I have no doubt Pagan embraces Thai cooking, I have never gotten past the 50-plus Burmese dishes, which satisfy my deepest Southeast Asian food cravings. Each Burmese preparation is more delicious than the next.
No one eats at Pagan without starting with a Burmese salad, such as the famous tea leaf salad ($7.95), a square plate of ingredients separated into little piles — tiny strips of fermented green tea leaves, crunchy fried lentils, toasted sesame seeds, peanuts, fresh green chiles, powdered dried shrimp and the San Franciscan addition of cut-up romaine lettuce, all of which the waiter tosses at the table to produce a soulful Burmese-style Caesar salad. The likeness is uncanny, though the ingredients, except for the lettuce, are different.
Burmese noodle salad ($7.75) is dressed in a smoldering hot peanut sauce that grows in intensity with each bite, balanced by just the right amount of vinegar, cool threads of cucumber and crunchy fried shallots — a playful and luscious mix.
Then, move on to soup, like the hearty vegetarian samusa soup ($8.50), hot and sour dal, or lentil broth, loaded with cut-up Indian samosas, chunks of falafel and soft potato. Each spoonful is excitingly different.
Burmese coconut chicken noodle soup ($8.25) is one of the great comfort-food dishes on the planet — a creamy, perfectly balanced hot, sweet-and-sour, coconut-milk broth with juicy dark chicken meat, chewy noodles and the signature crunch of fried shallots.
For main dishes, choose among curries and lentil-based stews and biriyanis. One of my favorites is the seasonal pan-fried okra with prawns ($11), the tiny okra pods green, crisp, deliciously charred and smothered in a well-salted tomato sauce aromatic with cinnamon and other sweet spices. The sauce picks up the flavor of okra, currently at its peak.
Pumpkin pork stew ($9.50), sweetly marinated meat and cubes of orange squash with thin edible skin, long simmered in a dal-thickened
sauce, is like Sunday supper.
For lovers of the festive Indian rice dish biriyani ($10), Pagan’s Burmese version does the trick, with lots of moist lamb, whole cashews, raisins, crispy shallots and bright yellow, flavor-infused rice.
Shwe Kyi ($3.50), warm, steamed, semolina cake, cut into bite-size squares, studded with raisins and infused with coconut milk, hints at sweetness and is surprisingly refreshing. It disappears, even after a huge meal.
Pagan’s corner space, once a Thai noodle house, has been charmingly redone with a high-peaked, wood-beamed ceiling and gold splashed walls. The colorful food looks radiant in modern white china placed on dark wooden tables.
Factor in Pagan’s affordability and expect the crowds to be milling in front very soon. The cooking, though exotic for most of us, somehow tastes like home.
