Gantawin on Jalan Lebuh Pudu in Kuala Lumpur’s gritty old downtown district, the area behind Kotaraya shopping complex, serves perhaps the best Myanmarese/Burmese food in the city, catering to the roughly 100,000-strong Myanmar community in Kuala Lumpur.
Restaurant staff, their cheeks plastered with the distinctive yellow-hued thanaka cosmetic paste, plucking roselle leaves for use in soups and stir-fries.
Besides the a la carte menu, the restaurant also has a self-service food counter with a variety of dishes (which change daily, depending on what raw produce is available in the market) that customers can select from for their lunch plates.
Mohinga - practically Burma’s national dish: a sour-spicy noodle dish with an addictive fish broth. I particularly liked the boiled banana stems, and the crunchy crisp-fried split pea fritters called pè gyaw.
See Kyat Kyauk-Swe - this is a very garlicky fried/braised noodle dish, served with a small bowl of pork-rib and gourd soup. The egg noodles had a lovely texture which reminded me somewhat of Chinese “yee mein”, and the garlicky dressing tasted pretty close to Chinese ones.
This mohinga is practically unrecognizable from the mohinga we got here. In fact, none of the mohingas we got here are sour and spicy. Never seen banana stems and so much ‘stuff’ in ours either. Here its just a soup with chunks of catfish in there. Is this the real deal?
I imagine the banana stems were omitted by your local Burmese restaurants as they are not easily acquired.
The KL mohinga I had are the same as those from Singapore’s Myanmar restaurants, e.g. Inle, which was my regular hangout for good Burmese eats. This would be the Rangoon/Yangon version.
Banana stems seem to be a distinguishing feature - I first encountered mohinga during my college days in Australia, as I had Burmese classmates who cooked that - I remembered being surprised to see that particular ingredient since we have bananas trees in Singapore/Malaysia, but no one uses the stems for cooking. We’d use banana flowers for salads or curries.
Would you happen to have any pictures of the mohinga you had? I can ask my friend, Bryan Koh, who wrote this huge tome on Burmese food, “0451 Morninga are for Mont Hin Gar”. He spent years trekking through the country’s various regions, so may be able to explain.
BTW, just sharing some pictures I took a couple of years ago at Penang’s Dhammikarama Burmese temple - I’d taken my 3 visiting Singaporean aunties there, as they were devout Buddhists. We were served the mohinga, and you can see the sliced banana stem here:
Dhammikarama Burmese Buddhist temple is one of Penang’s oldest, by the way - built in 1803, and it grew and grew, as the Burmese, together with the Siamese and Chinese, were among the earliest settlers in Penang when they came in the 1780s.
The ones you have there looked about right. I think the Myanmarese in the US just made do with what they had there to produce something which closely approximate what they missed from their homeland.
It’s like the now-defunct Straits Restaurant at the Westfield SF Centre which purportedly served “Singapore food”. I was a regular and would drop in there whenever I suddenly develop a pang for some familiar “Asian” taste when I used to work in SF for protracted periods back in 2006-2010. Of course, nothing really tasted like what we got back in Singapore, but had been adjusted to satisfy local tastes and supply constraints.
I remembered once ordering roti prata served with supposedly “sayur lodeh” - in the first place, no one eats prata with sayur lodeh (a spicy, coconut-enriched vegetable stew) in Singapore, but I ordered it anyway. I surmised that owner, Chris Yeo (a Singaporean to boot), offered that because American customers would expect to see larger pieces of vegetables, instead of just a plain dhal curry with tiny pieces of carrots or radish. But, even then, what I was eventually served turned out to be Thai green curry!! It wasn’t even “sayur lodeh”!
