Rangoon Restaurant

Burmese cooking is rare enough in Canada that wanting it usually means knowing a single address. In Ottawa, that address sits on Somerset Street West, in the heart of Chinatown, where Rangoon makes the case for a cuisine most diners have never tried. The kitchen ferments its own tea leaves, builds salads on morning-made tamarind and roasted chickpeas, and treats the line between Southeast Asian neighbours as a real one — Burmese, not generically pan-Asian. It is a family-run table, and the menu reads like one: long, specific, and unworried about whether the dishes are familiar.

Start with the Green Tea Leaf Salad, the dish Burmese cooks use to explain themselves. Laphet thoke tosses fermented tea leaves with romaine, tomatoes, roasted garlic, peanuts, sesame, chickpeas, dried beans and pumpkin seeds — bitter, sour and crunchy in a single forkful, a flavour with no real equivalent on a Canadian menu. Mohinga, the fish noodle soup many Burmese treat as a national breakfast, comes built on lemongrass, rice noodles, red onions and cilantro. The Coconut Noodle Soup pours a rich coconut broth over egg noodles and chicken; the Chicken Shan Noodles, the kitchen's own pick, layer rice noodles with pickled mustard leaves, chili and coriander. Even the starters stay specific — chickpea bites are fried to order from a chilled, cooked batter and sent out with tamarind for dipping.

The rest of the menu spreads wide. The salad list runs through ginger, green papaya, tomato and broccoli, each tossed with peanuts and that morning-made tamarind dressing. The vegetarian section is no afterthought — eggplant, squash and chickpea curries, a mushroom-and-tofu stir fry, Shan noodles rebuilt on tofu — cooked with the attention the meat dishes get. Curries come in chicken, pork, beef, fish and shrimp, several finished in a mild, creamy coconut sauce. To drink, there is Burmese tea, strong and black, pulled with condensed and evaporated milk in the tea-shop manner, and a fresh lime soda cut with cane sugar and a pinch of salt. Sides extend the same pantry past the mains — pickled tea leaves dressed with garlic, oil and dried shrimp; a peanut-and-sesame crumble; coconut rice steamed with pandan.

What the menu adds up to is a pantry, not a concept. Fermented tea leaves, tamarind, pickled mustard leaves, chickpea powder, peanuts and sesame recur across dishes until they read as a grammar rather than a garnish. Many plates carry their Burmese names beside the English, and the care reaches past the plate: local reporting records the owner describing the coconut chicken as dry-brined for several hours before it meets the pan. This is a kitchen confident the food needs no translation.

Rangoon is Ngun Tial's restaurant. Local reporting names her as owner and chef, and traces a path that runs well outside the kitchen: her family reached Ottawa in 1999, after several years in India, as refugees from Myanmar. She opened Rangoon on Gloucester Street in 2010 and moved it to its Somerset Street West home in 2018, carrying the cooking — and its hard-to-source pantry — across the city with it. The name points home — Rangoon is the old name for Yangon, Myanmar's largest city.

The food rewards a table that comes curious. Dishes are built to share, the spice tuned toward flavour over heat, and the kitchen lets guests bring their own wine for a small corkage — an easy pairing for cooking this aromatic. Reservations are by phone, the dining room plain and unhurried. Rangoon also sends its food out for delivery, the curries and noodle soups holding up well in a bag. The surest way into the menu is the oldest one: order across the table, begin with the tea leaf salad, and let the dishes most diners have never met do the explaining.