If you are ever here, eat there #28 Mandalay

MinGaLaBar! It's a friendly greeting in Burmese and also the name of a cool restaurant where you can sample traditional Burmese dishes in a blissfully air-conditioned setting in the heart of Mandalay.

After many trips to South East Asia, we finally got to Myanmar (Burma), which was under military dictatorship and closed to much of the rest of the world from 1962 to 2011. The tourism industry is consequently much less developed than in neighbouring Thailand and although we saw some visitors, in many temples and historic sites we were pretty much on our own (especially earlier in the day). That is, until we reached Mingalabar!

MinGaLaBar is hardly a hidden gem. It features on TripAdvisor and just about all the tourist and foody recommendation sites for Mandalay, so it was bustling with what looked like a mix of tourists and locals when we arrived for lunch. Some touches seemed there to reassure nervous Westerners (like a stainless steel sterilising cabinet in which the crockery was displayed), and it being close to Christmas, many of the waiters wore silly Christmas hats.

Bamboo shoot soup in the foreground, sambals in the background

Service is warm and family-style: you order your main dish and they bring you sambals for the table, a bamboo shoot soup for a starter, and dish out rice on your plate as needed. The sambals were fish paste, coriander chilli paste, peanuts, fresh herbs, beans, cucumber slices, okra, aubergine, green bean in fish sauce, etc.

We selected pork curry with dried mango, mutton curry and curried loach fish, all flavourful, delicious, and not particularly spicy. We also tried the grilled mutton salad, tea leaf salad and rice salad with tea leaf. Tea leaf salad is one of the national dishes in Myanmar (the only country where tea is not only drunk, but eaten) and so of course we had to try it. We reckon the flavour of fermented tea is an acquired taste. But the grilled mutton salad was excellent. The rice salad with tea leaf was the spiciest dish by far, and came with two little sausages (they look like red grapes on the photo) which tasted a bit like very finely minced salami.

Rice with tea leaf salad

Dessert was complimentary: sticky rice caramelised in brown sugar (kind of a coarse caramel popcorn). While not a must-have, it was a fun way to end the meal.

After having sampled Burmese food over 10 days in many different restaurants, MinGaLaBar seems to offer typical dishes, well-prepared and in a pleasant setting. We were there for lunch, but they are open for breakfast and dinner too.

Address: 71st Street, Between 28th & 29th Street 
Chan Aye Tharzan Township, Mandalay 
Myanmar.
Phone: 02 4060480 . 
Email : info@mingalabarrestuarant.com