Burma Superstar (San Francisco)
A server mixes the tea leaf salad at your table: fermented tea leaves, romaine, lemon, fried garlic, toasted peanuts. No reservations, and the line on Clement Street has been forming since 1992.
Why go
Julia Chen scored it 8.1 for the Infatuation and got the history right in one sentence: This spot wasn't the first Burmese restaurant in the city, but it did help push the cuisine mainstream when it opened in 1992.
1 The menu runs past fifty items and the kitchen holds them all. Chen puts the range to work for you: Come here once a week and you'll rarely order the same thing twice.
She names the sesame chicken as lightly battered and crispy
and the pumpkin pork stew as loaded with creamy slices of kabocha squash,
and calls the platha and dip the foolproof way to start things off.
The room is small, plain and full, which is a fair description of most great Burmese cooking in the Bay.
Order this / avoid
- Order: the platha and dip first, then the tea leaf salad, then the garlic and chili shrimp. Chen on the shrimp: "You need to eat this." If you have had the tea leaf salad before, take the rainbow salad instead: twenty-two ingredients, four kinds of noodle, tamarind vinaigrette.
- Avoid: waiting in a long line without checking the alternatives. Chen names Burmese Kitchen and Mandalay, both within a few blocks.
What locals & experts say
- The Infatuation SF (Julia Chen, 2023), 8.1:
This Burmese institution never disappoints.
On the tea leaf salad:the earthy fermented tea leaves and the nutty crunch will keep you reaching for second (and third) servings.
1 - MICHELIN Guide California: standing not established.
Good to know
- Timing: lunch and dinner. Weekend evenings are the worst wait.
- Booking: no reservations.
- Getting there: Clement Street at 4th Avenue, Inner Richmond.
Verdict
should-visit — Thirty-four years on Clement Street and a scored 8.1 from the Infatuation, with the critic's own reason: 'Decades later, this simple space in the Richmond is still perpetually packed.' The kitchen runs more than fifty dishes and holds the line on all of them, which is the harder version of consistency. The tea leaf salad is a genuinely distinctive thing to eat in this country and it is mixed at the table, so the technique is on show.