BURMA SUPERSTAR, SAN FRANCISCO

After the baseball game, we decided to take advantage of the fact that we were in SF and had a friend visiting by having dinner at Burma Superstar in the Inner Richmond. Now Burma Superstar is one of these super famous SF restaurants that everyone talks about and tells you you have to go to. If you get there anytime after 5:30, you'll have to wait to get in. Luckily, by the time the game ended, we were able to get over to the restaurant a little before 6. There was already a crowd waiting to get in, so we dropped Tom off to put our names down while we circled around for parking.

I'm still get accustomed to SF and all the neighborhoods there, so I was quite surprised to find this super famous restaurant located in the midst of a working class Asian neighborhood. Really, it wasn't super nice, and it was surrounded by typical Chinese shops - we even grabbed boba drinks three doors down while we waited for our table to be ready. But this just proves that ppl in the Bay Area will go almost anywhere for great food. We waited about 30 minutes before we got in, to a pretty small, cramped, kinda loud restaurant.

To be honest, the space wouldn't have been so cramped if they had chosen to use slightly smaller tables, but whatever. At least we were seated. We were ignored a little bit at first, (just due to how busy this place was), but that was alleviated when our super nice and cheery waitress came to take our order. Since we'd spent a while outside, we had perused the menu and decided on what we'd be ordering. We shared a number of dishes. I started off by ordering one of their famous tea life salads which was a : Salad prepared with imported Burmese tea leaves, tomatoes, lettuce, dried shrimp (or vegetarian), fried garlic, sesame seeds, peanuts, and split yellow peas. Here's what it looks like when they've mixed it all up for you.

Ok, I'm kinda lame, but for some reason when I heard tea leaf salad I had imagine fresh tea leaves (like on this episode of Bizarre Eats when Andrew Zimmern visited Taiwan). Of course, this is pretty preposterous to have fresh tea since they all grow in Asia and would be oxidized before they even shipped to the U.S. (I didn't think this through until later). At any rate, I really enjoyed this salad. Tom didn't really like it, but I liked all the different flavors and textures. And the tea leaves added this delicate almost soapy (but not unpleasant) character to it all. It was my favorite dish of the entire meal.

Ok. Onto the other stuff. This was a dish of stir fried chicken breast with tofu, string beans, red bell peppers, and basil in our five spice sweet heat sauce.

It was pretty good. I liked the dried tofu. Oh, this is also where they screwed up. Apparently this also came in a beef version, which they gave to us initially. Luckily, I hadn't eaten any of the beef before they figured it out and gave us the correct plate with chicken. So we got a free plate of food out of it.

This is a plate of honestly I don't remember. I think it involved chicken, tomatoes, onions and green beans (but that's what I'm identifying from the photo).

And lastly we got a plate of Garlic Chili Shrimp: Wok tossed shrimp in our garlicky infused oil, and topped with toasted garlic.

Overall our dinner at Burma Superstar was pretty good. We hadn't had Burmese food before, and it's this interesting mix of South Asian, Chinese and Indian influences. However, I don't think Tom thought it was all the great, and it certainly wasn't amazing enough for us to make the trip out there, look for parking and wait. And it wasn't all that inexpensive, either. We did find out that they have a location in Alameda, which is at least on our side of the bay, but I again, I don't think it's worth all the effort. We could probably be just as satisified with a cheap Chinese restaurant.