“Once we started doing the pop-ups, I was surprised at how little people here knew about Burmese food. A huge part of the pop-up was educating diners on what the cuisine actually is.”
That’s Jessie Nicely, a Los Angeles data programmer and co-founder of the food zine Compound Butter. Nicely launched a pop-up serving Burmese food, cheekily called Burmese, Please! in LA’s Chinatown neighborhood in 2018. Nicely grew up in Oakland and is half-Burmese on her mother’s side. Having been raised around the cuisine and a flourishing Burmese restaurant scene in the Bay Area, she was shocked by the relative ignorance about the food in LA, where other Southeast Asian cuisines thrive.
“Burmese ingredients aren’t all that different from those used in a lot of other Southeast Asian cuisines, but for whatever reason, they can be too much for people,” Nicely says.
Nicely started serving her take on dishes like tea leaf salad and mohinga (a traditional catfish stew) at the weekly Downtown LA food festival Smorgasburg in January 2020. Months later, with the event on long-term hiatus due to the pandemic, Burmese, Please! moved to the shared Craft Kitchen, where it “blew up for a while” by offering pickup-only kits for dishes like coconut curry and vegan ohn no khao swe, a typical curried noodle dish with a variety of toppings…