INTRODUCTION: A BREAKOUT STAR
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When people ask what, exactly, Burma Superstar is, the short answer is to say that it’s a popular neighborhood restaurant. Yet, like most restaurants that have been around for a couple of decades, there’s a lot more to the story.

Over the past twenty-five years or so, Burma Superstar has evolved into the kind of institution where people wait (and wait) for a table to eat twenty-plus-ingredient salads, samosas in soup, and rich, savory curries. It’s morphed into a cultural ambassador, introducing a few unusual Burmese ideas—like eating tea—to American audiences. And it’s transformed into a company that hires and trains refugees from Asia with the help of relief organizations. The success of Burma Superstar can’t be attributed to any single person. The original owners, the Wu family; Desmond Tan, who bought the restaurant in 2000; Joycelyn Lee, Desmond’s wife–turned–business partner; the many cooks, servers, dishwashers, and managers who have worked there throughout the years—all have played important roles.

Yet if you had pegged this restaurant to be a hit from day one, people would have called you crazy.

Burma Superstar opened in 1992 on San Francisco’s Clement Street, a corridor of Chinese grocery stores and modest restaurants in the Inner Richmond, the city’s other Chinatown. The Wus, a Burmese-Chinese family, took over a Chinese restaurant, added some Burmese dishes, and renamed it Burma Superstar. They wanted a name that connoted a super successful restaurant. In those days, though, there wasn’t much demand for a place serving food from a country that no one knew anything about. The restaurant was also on the wrong block. All of the action on Clement Street happened west of 6th Avenue.

Karen Wong, a longtime employee who grew up in the neighborhood, remembers walking by the perennially empty restaurant well before she started working there. No one ever thought of going out to eat on that block, she recalls. The dark interior, with low ceilings and a gazebo encompassing most of the dining room, didn’t add curb appeal. Mr. and Mrs. Wu played it safe, keeping a lot of the dishes from the previous restaurant’s menu. Along with Burmese curries and soups, there was Mongolian beef, kung pao chicken, and five kinds of egg foo yong. That was what people in the neighborhood wanted.

The San Francisco restaurant scene has always been a competitive one, but during the 1990s, Inner Richmond restaurants competed largely on price over flavor. In order to attract frugal customers (who may only visit the restaurant once), it was common for places on Clement Street to lower their prices to such an extent that the owners could no longer cover operating costs. That fate had struck Burma Superstar. The Wus wanted out of the business. In the fall of 2000, they put the restaurant up for sale.

Desmond and Joycelyn were eating lunch at Burma Superstar on a Saturday when they found out that the restaurant was for sale. All signs pointed to converting Burma Superstar back into a Chinese restaurant. But the restaurant had long become a favorite spot for Desmond and his family. When he had started dating Joycelyn, he introduced the restaurant to her and she soon became a loyal customer. While neither had any experience with restaurants—Desmond ran a tech consulting firm and Joycelyn was a graphic designer—they couldn’t stand the idea that their source for mohinga would soon be gone.

Joycelyn encouraged Desmond to buy the place. “How difficult could running a restaurant be?” she said.

He passed along his phone number to a server and said he wanted to talk to someone about buying the business. On Sunday night around 10:00 p.m., Mr. Wu called Desmond.

“Are you really interested in buying the restaurant?” Mr. Wu asked, incredulous. “Don’t you want to take a look at it first?”

The next day, Desmond walked through the space. The tiny kitchen was cramped and needed countless improvements, and there was still that gazebo problem in the dining room. But Desmond’s main concern about buying Burma Superstar wasn’t the physical space. Before taking over the restaurant, he wanted to make sure he could retain the kitchen staff, including Wai K. Law, a Chinese chef whom everyone called Jacky (with a “y”)—a tribute to how his cooking skills brought to mind Jackie Chan—and Ma Sein, a woman who grew up in Yangon. Mr. Wu assured him that the odds were good the staff would stay, especially if Desmond paid them a little more.

By Wednesday, Desmond had signed the deal and brought in his company’s office manager to organize the restaurant’s accounts. The staff got a raise. Desmond and Joycelyn worked with a fly-by-night ponytailed contractor Desmond met over burritos in the Mission District to give the interior a quick fix (adios, gazebo). When the contractor failed to show up one day (Desmond suspected he headed to Southeast Asia to take part in the expat life), Joycelyn found herself laying tile to finish the job. Not everything changed though. An old chair that no one sat in remained in the kitchen. Joycelyn suggested moving it out—or at least getting a new one—but the cooks protested. It was the ghost chair, and if it were gone, how would the restaurant be hospitable to ghosts? So she let it be. When it came to spirits, it was better to play it safe.

Making money was not the primary objective in buying the restaurant, and Desmond was prepared to take a loss while getting a better sense of the restaurant business. He never intended to quit his day job. Joycelyn wanted to learn how restaurants operated, so she came in after work to wait tables. Desmond arrived later, bussing tables and taking over in the dish pit so the dishwasher could catch the last bus back to Daly City. About four months into owning the restaurant, however, the effects of San Francisco’s dot-com bust began to be felt all over the city. When Joycelyn lost her job, she turned her full attention to the restaurant. But this was not a great time to be invested in restaurants, especially one on the sleepy side of 6th Avenue. One night they hit a new low, grossing only $300. Joycelyn was worried. How could this restaurant sustain itself if it couldn’t pay its employees?

The answer came in rethinking the menu. Joycelyn began to spend more time in the kitchen, learning how to chop onions and stir-fry rice. When hiring new kitchen employees, she would tell them that they had to be able to chop onions faster than her. Being in the kitchen also exposed her to what the cooks liked to make for their own meals, and she would ask questions. One day it was a noodle salad seasoned with tamarind water. “How many kinds of noodles are in this?” she asked. “Can we make this for customers?” Today, Rainbow Salad—made with more than twenty ingredients—rivals only the Tea Leaf Salad for most popular dish on the menu.

Meanwhile, Desmond used his time washing dishes as an opportunity to see what people were leaving on the plate. It was clear to both Joycelyn and Desmond that many dishes had to go. No more egg foo yong, no more Mongolian beef. No more of a dish called Southeast Asian Chicken served with french fries. Some Burmese dishes were modified too. Instead of making Tea Leaf Salad with shredded cabbage, the old-school way, they made it California-style, with sliced romaine lettuce.

While revamping the menu, they realized they had to do a better job of explaining Burmese food. Everyone had a lot of questions. Is it like Thai food? Indian food? No…and yes. Burmese cooking is savory, salty, and tart. Curries are subtle compared with those of neighboring countries, while salads can be enticingly over-the-top with textures and flavors. To make the salads more understandable, Joycelyn and Desmond trained the servers to mix salads tableside and point out each ingredient as they mixed. But even while retooling the menu to focus on Burmese flavors, no one wanted to strip the menu of popular Chinese dishes completely. Today, the stir-fried Chili Lamb remains a perennial favorite.

To expose more people to unfamiliar Burmese fare, Desmond began asking tables if he could order them one dish to see if they liked it. The Tea Leaf Salad became a test. If the table liked it, he would recommend more Burmese dishes, like Pumpkin Pork Stew. And if they didn’t, he’d play it safe and suggest Sesame Chicken.

Gradually word got around about other dishes, like Coconut Rice topped with fried onions and Samusa Soup, and by the mid-2000s, hour-long waits for tables were everyday occurrences. The daily crowds that gathered in front of the restaurant grabbed the attention of Lynda Vong, who grew up in the neighborhood and worked at a school down the street. She walked in one day, asked for a job, and has been there ever since. Karen Wong, Lynda’s friend from school, also joined the team, becoming the keeper of the wait list. Armed with a flip phone, she quickly learned crowd-control strategies—free hot tea for waiting customers became one solution. So did a hostess podium. Mr. and Mrs. Wu’s nephew, Kenneth, also came in on the weekends to help in the kitchen because he thought it was important that more people eat Burmese food.

Every now and again, Desmond would get a call from a Burmese restaurant owner asking him to buy his business. Desmond always said no; one Burma Superstar was enough. Then in 2007 he started talking to an owner of a Burmese restaurant in Alameda, a city on the other side of the Bay Bridge next to Oakland. It was a fifty-seat space along Park Street, the main drag, with a sunny back area shared with a hair salon. The man was ready to sell. Desmond decided to take the chance and test the popularity of Burmese food outside of the Inner Richmond. Chuck Chin was one of the first employees hired. A Chinese cook originally from Yangon who had spent more than a decade cooking in Texas before moving to Oakland, Chuck heard about the job opening through his brother, was promptly hired, and has been there ever since.

While working on the Alameda restaurant, Desmond found another potential restaurant space on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood and nabbed it. But by then it was 2009, the economy was in another downturn, and, like in 2001, nobody was eating out. Plus, the Telegraph Avenue location had all kinds of things wrong with it. A tree blocked the front entrance. Neighboring eateries had security issues. And the restaurant space—as Desmond learned after the fact—wasn’t even legally a restaurant space. Osama Asif, one of the restaurant’s managers, had to straighten that all out with the city of Oakland. To make matters more ominous, opening manager Tiyo Bestia received a letter from a neighbor calling the staff crazy for wanting to open a restaurant in that cursed space. But the restaurant was a runaway success. That pesky tree out front? A bench was built around it where people could sit and wait for a table. (The neighbor later apologized for writing the letter.)

A lot of people put chefs on pedestals, but everyone is important in Burma Superstar’s operations. The restaurants’ staffs are multiethnic and multilingual, and all have their own traditions. Clement Street’s restaurant is like a tight-knit family that gets together after hours at the restaurant for occasional hot pot nights. At Oakland and Alameda, many employees—both in the front and the back of the house—are siblings. Some are refugees from Myanmar and other Asian countries. Alex Naitun Thawng (Nin for short), the kitchen manager at the Oakland restaurant, and Nang Khan Cin (nicknamed Afoo), who co-runs the Alameda restaurant with Chuck, found their way to Burma Superstar through the International Rescue Committee, a refugee relief organization that helps with resettlement. Both managers are Chin, one of Myanmar’s numerous ethnic groups. Kitchen meetings at all of the restaurants are games of telephone, with words translated into everything from Chinese and Burmese to Chin and Spanish. The multicultural backdrop of the restaurants parallels the melting pot within Myanmar, which is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in Asia.

It is true that attaching “Superstar” to a restaurant’s name is an audacious thing to do. It’s even out of character, considering that there is no one star player—no chef, owner, manager, cook, or server—who can take all of the credit for the success of the restaurants. But there is another rising star deserving of attention, and it’s Myanmar itself. After decades of military rule, the country held its first democratic elections in 2015. For many Burmese employees at the restaurants, this is the first time in their lives that they have had reason to hope for a better future for the relatives they left behind. On a less serious level, political reform is making it possible to dig deeper into Burmese food, whether it’s by visiting the source of the country’s best fermented tea leaves (see “Eat Your Tea”) or simply by exploring regions that were once closed to foreigners.

This book is a starting point. We’ve only scratched the surface.