Irrawaddy Taste of Burma

When Irrawaddy Taste of Burma describes itself as “the best Burmese restaurant in Orange County” on its Instagram account, that’s not as immodest as it sounds: Nearly 10 years after it opened in Stanton, not too far from Rodeo 39 Public Market, Irrawaddy remains the only Burmese restaurant in Orange County. That’s sort of surprising given how many neighboring countries are well-represented here, as India, China, Thailand, and even Laos all have multiple Orange County restaurant options. But when it comes to food from Burma – today known as Myanmar – unless you’re willing to hunt down a few other options in LA or San Diego Counties, Irrawaddy’s your only local choice.

Thankfully, it’s pretty good, serving dishes that aren’t quite on par with San Francisco’s award-winning Mandalay, but are better than any Burmese we sampled over the years in Buffalo, NY. On the surface, Irrawaddy’s menu has a lot in common with Mandalay’s, offering over 60 traditional Burmese dishes ranging from tea leaf salad to southern-style nun gyi thote noodles, also known as nan gyi thoke or nan gyi dok. Here, there are no Chinese dishes but some a handful with Indian or Thai overlaps, as well as a drink list that includes a Thai iced tea-like Burmese sweet black tea made with cream and condensed milk, a salted limeade, coconut juice, and Myanmar beer.

Even where the menus directly overlap, the execution turns out to be so different from place to place that the similarities feel largely conceptual, and flavors are more like cousins than siblings. For instance, Irrawaddy’s sesame-dusted tea leaf salad contained many of the same ingredients as Mandalay’s, but the flavor wasn’t as distinctively earthy or richly nutty. Similarly, Irrawaddy’s southern noodles are thicker and pastier, with less chicken than cracklins – pretty good, compared with Mandalay’s pretty great.

The contrast is most striking with Irrawaddy’s “rainbow salad,” which is almost entirely yellow, brown, and orange, thanks to more of those pasty noodles, chopped potatoes, chickpea powder, fried garlic, shallots, and basic shredded vegetables. By comparison, Mandalay’s is actually rainbow-colored, fresher-tasting, and sports a wider range of 20 ingredients. Similarly, the samusa soup – a lentil broth with broken up samusa dumplings inside, beloved by Mandalay patrons, started out soup-like at Irrawaddy but quickly congealed into a yellow curry-like solid as we ate. It wasn’t bad, but wasn’t excellent, either.