A NEW BURMESE FOOD STAND IS COMING TO MANHATTAN

It’s not often to find a mall food court stand that serves food superb enough to surpass convenience, but Burmese Bites looks and smells nothing like the McDonald’s, Panda Express, and Sbarro beside it at the Queens Center Mall, a shopping hub of Elmhurst.

In 2022, Burmese Bites launched as a stand at the mall’s food court, and in the process, became part of a small Burmese food boom in New York. Now, chef and owner Myo Lin Thway is expanding to Manhattan, with a kiosk inside Mona Kitchen, a Midtown lunch spot, at 310 E. 44th Street, near Second Avenue — just down the street from the United Nations headquarters. It opens on April 18.

The menu tracks with its Queens location: In Manhattan, it includes three different noodles, like ohn no khao swe, a Burmese chicken curry noodle dish, as well as beef curry rice over rice with veggies. All dishes are halal-friendly. Thway is piloting the introduction of ngapi, a fish paste, as an add-on: “Yes, it’s pungent and stinky, like blue cheese in American cuisine, but I’m trying to introduce that something that we eat all the time,” he says.

The Manhattan expansion was born both out of necessity and chance. “My sister works at the United Nations, and saw the empty booth, and suggested it: I thought why not, let’s give it a try,” he says. Despite built-in foot traffic at the mall, the original location has been a struggle. “It’s really hard to convince people to not just go to a chain restaurant [in the food court], and try something they’ve never heard of or tried before.”

This isn’t the first time Thway has focused on the Manhattan lunch crowd. His ambitions have always been greater than mall food; soon after opening there, in tandem, he launched deliveries that expanded outside the borough — a pain in the neck to schedule, but worth it to him as a means of getting his food known. Now, he’s banking on the return of the Midtown lunch rush and to gain a footing amongst a crowded line-up of delivery options.

Restaurants like Burmese Bites have brought greater attention to food from Burma, represented by a small immigrant population in New York: Just 189,000 people in America are Burmese, according to a 2019 Pew Research report. Burmese Bites joins operators like Yun Cafe (now closed), and its sibling, Little Myanmar (still open), plus Rangoon, which has grown to two locations — a meager beginning, but a change of tides following a time when Burmese food was near-impossible to find in the city.

“My mission is not only to sell food and make money: as much as people [get] Japanese food, with sushi, or Korean food with bulgogi, I want them to know Burmese food,” he says. “I always dreamed of expanding, this is just the beginning if things go according to plan.”

Burmese Bites Manhattan will be open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. To start, the restaurant is doing takeout only, but delivery will follow.

2024-04-16T15:11:52Z dg43tfdfdgfd