The food of Burma (now Myanmar) is an amalgam of Indian, Chinese, and Southeast Asian cuisines and reminds me most of Thai, Vietnamese, and Cambodian cooking. At YoMa, lemongrass, chili peppers, lime, garlic, ginger, shallots, and cilantro are plentiful, as are rice and noodles. YoMa's owner, Burmese-born Sai Kyaw, slow-cooks some of his dishes and uses a mortar to hand-grind some spices, a laborious process that brings out subtle flavors.
When YoMa is good, it is very, very good. Its primary weakness isn't its food, it's its service. Case in point: the two-hour wait for one of our food orders. More on that below.
If I were to assemble the perfect YoMa meal, I'd start with AaMaeTharThot ($6.95), a barbecued beef salad with a sneaky spiciness that creeps in slowly and, if you happen to bite into a chili pepper, explodes like fire. For soup, I'd have the marvelous JaZanHinGar ($4.75) made with chicken, clear noodles, and black mushrooms. Try a spoonful as is; then add the lime, fish sauce, and dried chilis that come with it. They transform a nice soup into something entirely different -- a sour, salty, smoky concoction that's much more complex and satisfying.
Three entrees are standouts: jumbo shrimp curry ($8.75) in an aromatic mixture of tomatoes, shallots, garlic, cumin, and coriander; KhaYanTheeNut ($8.95), stewed eggplant that gets subtle sweetness from palm sugar; and MeeShay ($7.45), slow-roasted pork so tender it falls apart with the nudge of a chopstick. Accompanying the pork is silken tofu lightly fried in delicious chickpea flour batter.
I know what I wouldn't order again, too. BuThee Jaw ($4.25), gourd tempura, tastes like fried zucchini sticks; skip it, as well as the heavily fried spring rolls ($4.25) and Shan-KhotSwe ($6.50), bland chicken curry made with unappetizing dark meat. Seafood salad ($9.95) is generously stocked with shrimp, squid, crab, and fish; but it lacks a strong marinade to meld the tastes together.
