Mingalaba Restaurant: The real Burma superstar
The rainbow chicken at Mingalaba Restaurant in Burlingame.
If you ask most folks in the Bay Area where to get the best Burmese food, they will all say the same thing: Burma Superstar. If you ask me, I will say, “Mingalaba Restaurant.” Those other people … They haven’t been to Mingalaba, yet, because it’s in Burlingame.
Just like uber-popular Burma Superstar, Mingalaba serves beautiful, luscious dishes made with fresh ingredients. Unlike Burma Superstar, you do not have to wait two hours for a table, and you don’t have to pay the big bucks for a plate of food.
My boyfriend David and I always stuck to the items on the menu marked as Burmese dishes. Other items on the menu seems to be more of your garden-variety Thai cuisine dishes. If we wanted Thai food, we get Thai food, you know what I mean?
Burmese-style saffron rice at Mingalaba Restaurant in Burlingame.
We loved to start with the Paratha, a crispy pancake with savory curry dipping sauce. It’s a little messy, but it’s delicious. We could never resist the raindow chicken, one of the restaurant’s specialities with pan-fried chicken with fresh mangoes, sweet pineapples and crunchy vegetables. The Burmese-style curry beef, which is almost like a stew beef, is very flavorful and tender, but a little bit of burn to it. Prepare yourself. I drank a lot of wine with it. The spicy asparagus tofu has also got a little bit of a kick to it, but it is one of my favorite things on the menu. The tofu is cooked perfectly, slightly crisp on the outside and firm on the inside and drenched in the spicy sauce. Of course, you can order rice with these dishes. You have a choice of coconut rice, white rice, fried rice, brown rice, etc., but I love to get the sweetly scented Burmese-style saffron rice with raisins and cashews. After dinner, the waitstaff always brings out little bowls of mango pudding, which is just enough to cool our heated palates.
My boyfriend David lived in B-game for seven months, and we consider Mingalaba our greatest Peninsula discovery. It is worth getting on the freeway for. We celebrated birthdays and anniversaries there, but you don’t need a special occasion to eat there.
Mingalaba Restaurant
1213 Burlingame Avenue
Burlingame, CA
http://www.pm-creative.com/mingalabarestaurant/index.html
(650) 343-3228
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3 Responses
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Mingalaba Restaurant sounds like a great find! I will have to try it because I absolutely love Burma Superstar, but hate the long wait times. I think Burma Superstar is very reasonably priced, though… unless they’ve gone up in price a lot in the past year.
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I think Mingalaba’s prices are a few bucks cheaper per dish.