Mandalay – San Francisco

While it’s possible to find a Burmese restaurant in Orange County, that sentence is literally the extent of local options: Stanton’s Irrawaddy Taste of Burma opened in 2016, and currently represents both the beginning and the end of OC’s list. Seeking some additional perspective after a series of universally disappointing Burmese meals elsewhere in the United States, we visited San Francisco’s James Beard Foundation-recognized Mandalay – not that city’s first Burmese restaurant, but its oldest remaining one, continuously operating since 1984 – and found it worthy of the America’s Classics Award it received in 2024.

Mandalay’s menu is a single tall laminated page with around 70 items across its front and back, roughly four-fifths Burmese and one-fifth Chinese or Thai. Many of the items are protein-swapped variations, such that Basil Beef, Lamb, Pork, Chicken, Prawn, and Spicy Eggplant occupy five total menu slots, with similar overlaps for Pumpkin, Honey Walnut, and Burmese Chili protein dishes. Appetizers start at $14, salads at $17, and soups at $19, with most entrees in the $20 to $24 range.

The dishes we tried all justified their prices: Mandalay’s rendition of the Burmese classic tea leaf salad arrived as a collection of individually piled tea leaves, lentils, green pepper, sesame seeds, ground shrimp, fried garlic, peanuts, and dressing, mixed tableside into a healthier, nuttier-tasting alternative to the overly salty or sour versions we’d tried before. A similarly disassembled rainbow salad was even more beautiful, colorful, and brightly flavored thanks to a mix of 20 different ingredients, while a mango salad was comparatively simpler but in no way short of sliced yellow mango, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, or green peppers.