Burma Superstar

Pin It Now!

Burma Superstar is one of those restaurants that's been around forever and has been on my list of places to eat, but since they don't take reservations the wait can be long.  Even on a Sunday lunchtime, the wait for a table was 30 minutes.  One of the dilemmas here are there are so many dishes to try, but they can't really seat large groups.
Burmese food is a mixture of Chinese, Thai and Indian food.  The flavors are usually spicy, sweet, and sour with a wide range of textures.   

The vegetable samusa soup was featured on Bay Area Backroads and Food Network.  Small crunchy samusas (fried dumplings) are mixed into a complex flavored broth.  Its more of a sweet and slightly sour type taste.  Even though the samusas are sitting in the soup, they still have some crunchy surprises to them when being ladled into your mouth.   

The tea salad here is probably one of the most famous dishes.  Ive had this dishes a couple times before having it here at Burma Superstar.  Burma Superstar has lettuce in their tea leaf salad and others Ive had before omitted this.  Again, as with most dishes here there a wide range of textures in each spoonful.  Its made up of various nuts and seeds as well as fermented tea leaves (said to be flown in from Burma), so its quite crunchy.  The salad is presented with all ingredients in their own neat piles then the server squeezes some lemon and it gets mixed up in a rolling motion.  

 

When its all mixed up, you get a bit of everything, although the seeds seem to be the one of the ingredients that you need to scoop up at the end.  The salad is refreshing and quite light tasting.  Although its a tea salad, there isn't much tea taste to it.  While everyone raves about this salad, I think its good, but not raveworthy.

 There are couple of options to soak up the various curries here.  A popular one is the coconut rice.  Its topped with some fried onions to give some texture to each bite.  The hint of coconut offers offers a nice dimension to all the tangy and spicy curries and other dishes.

I was slightly expecting the lamb curry to be similar to a lamb vindaloo since Burmese food has so many Indian influences.  Huge chunks of potatoes with tender pieces of lamb are mixed into a sweet curry.  I was hoping it was going to be spicy, but its not at all.  This dish is well made, but I didn't find it to be anything special.  I prefer the Indian lamb curries over this.

The platha bread is a play off of the paratha, Indian fried bread.  This was probably my favorite dish here.  The bread made up of thin layers and deep fried.  The exterior has this perfect crunch without  being greasy. 

You can sort of see the layers of bread here.

      

Address:                    Burma Superstar
                                   309 Clement St.
                                   San Francisco, CA
 

Type:                          Burmese/Chinese

Popular chomps:       tea leaf salad
                                  samusa soup
                                  coconut rice
                                  chili lamb
                                  pork belly
                                  rainbow salad
                                  ginger lemonade
                                  platha
                                  pumpkin pork stew
                                  nan pia dok                                  

Chomp worthy:         platha
                                  coconut rice
                                  samusa soup