Rangoon Restaurant

Burmese cooking is rare enough in Canada that wanting it usually means knowing a single address. In Ottawa, that address sits on Somerset Street West, in the heart of Chinatown, where Rangoon makes the case for a cuisine most diners have never tried. The kitchen ferments its own tea leaves, builds salads on morning-made tamarind and roasted chickpeas, and treats the line between Southeast Asian neighbours as a real one — Burmese, not generically pan-Asian. It is a family-run table, and the menu reads like one: long, specific, and unworried about whether the dishes are familiar.

Start with the Green Tea Leaf Salad, the dish Burmese cooks use to explain themselves. Laphet thoke tosses fermented tea leaves with romaine, tomatoes, roasted garlic, peanuts, sesame, chickpeas, dried beans and pumpkin seeds — bitter, sour and crunchy in a single forkful, a flavour with no real equivalent on a Canadian menu. Mohinga, the fish noodle soup many Burmese treat as a national breakfast, comes built on lemongrass, rice noodles, red onions and cilantro. The Coconut Noodle Soup pours a rich coconut broth over egg noodles and chicken; the Chicken Shan Noodles, the kitchen's own pick, layer rice noodles with pickled mustard leaves, chili and coriander. Even the starters stay specific — chickpea bites are fried to order from a chilled, cooked batter and sent out with tamarind for dipping.