street food

Myanmar offers a range of street food for the adventurous or perhaps foolhardy traveller. Of course the street food is definitely not for tourists it is for locals and caters to local tastes. Stalls are set up all over the streets serving all the courses of a good meal. Naturally the food is quite cheap certainly by western standards and its purpose is to provide decent food for workers served quickly. All of the stalls are simple and portable. Asian style food certainly makes for ease of setting up a street stall.
All you seem to need a few tables, seats, some sort of shelter and of course cooking facilities. Most stall holders have an ice box of some description also. The cooking is not usually done on gas but with hot coals. They heat up the stock and keep it bubbling while they cook the noodles or rice. In fact most of the rice is dispensed from large metal pots which are kept on heat.

This is an example of a typical street "restaurant". Plastic chairs are the norm for these places. Some of them are stool style as we see here, some are a more traditional style with a back and some are just tiny.  Note the cooking pots sitting on coal stoves. A stall like this would serve noodles or even rice dishes. As I mentioned every course of a meal is available on the street....lets have a look at some entrees...

This is a very popular snack or first course if one is wandering the streets having a progressive dinner. These are entrails or offal on a stick. Each stick is dipped into the simmering broth hopefully killing off all the bacteria. Judging by the popularity of these places it seems they are quite safe,though I dare say an acquired taste for westerners with delicate stomachs like myself. Note the cans used for various dipping sauces. The stool is also there as people will sit here and a number of sticks of offal just to get the flavour buds working! Needless to say this isn't the sort of place you'd come for a romantic dinner or to celebrate a successful business deal; they tend to not have extensive wine lists!

The next entrée we could sample is something a more familiar. The humble deep fried snack. In this case samosas and spring rolls. Once again very popular and quite common. This is also an indicator of the ethnic make up of Yangon. This photo was taken somewhere between Chinatown and what I've come to regard as little India. This stall holder obviously is making sure they capture business from both places...but of course who can resist something that's been deep fried. The hot oil is also kept bubbling with a coal/charcoal fire. In fact there are many stalls which fry food and most of the oil is heated without gas or electricity. A personal favourite is the hand cut potatoes deep fried on the street packaged and sold like potato chips (or crisps if you're from the UK). Excellent with beer almost as good as deep fried crickets!

Of course one has to be very careful walking around especially during the monsoon. It wouldn't pay to slip over and land in a pot full of hot cooking oil. As you would expect none of the cooking oil or hot coals have any safety guards around them. But that is the way things are here. There is a "refreshing" lack of safety precautions everywhere. (Don't get me started on crossing the roads...)