‘I can imagine expats weeping over it’: This new eatery spotlights Burmese comfort food

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You had me at “tofu bechamel”. The words are incongruous when placed together but at Ka Gyi, a new Burmese fusion restaurant in bustling Box Hill, they end up making all kinds of sense. This creamy sauce is made from yellow lentils, soaked, blitzed, then thickened over low heat until the liquid turns to a smooth slurry with an uncanny similarity to bechamel, the creamy mother sauce of French cuisine, friend to cauliflower cheese and tuna mornay. This warm, silky turmeric-tinged vegan version is perfect for saucing up noodles.

Those noodles are further bolstered by chicken curry, a sweet-salty slurry of palm sugar and soy sauce, crunchy peanuts, vibrant bok choi, a crisp Chinese doughnut, and dabs of chilli and garlic oil. It’s a freewheeling Melbourne version of classic Burmese comfort food: beautiful, surprising and utterly satisfying.

It’s not usual in Myanmar – the name Burma adopted in 1989 – to give this lentil sauce a French name. That’s the inspired decision of chef and owner Aung Kyaw, who arrived in Melbourne in 2019 to study commercial cookery, and ended up working in Italian and Chinese restaurants, picking up tips, tricks and styles from all kinds of cuisines, finding the similarities and crossovers. You see this multicultural sensibility throughout the menu, which includes chicken salad, salmon risotto and tiramisu.

I’m drawn to the Burmese dishes. Mote hin khar (often written as “mohinga”) is a famous fish noodle soup, commonly eaten for breakfast. The two-part dish comprises a large bowl of rice noodles, egg, fish cake and onion fritters, accompanied by a smaller bowl of soup enriched by slow-simmered fish bones and thickened with rice. You ladle the soup over the noodles: it’s tangy and rich. Kyay oo si kyat, a dry rice noodle dish with house-made pork balls and quail egg, is a cosy bowl of goodness. I can imagine expats weeping over it.

There are just 22,000 people in Victoria with “broader Burmese” ancestry, a cover-all term which accounts for the many different ethnicities in the South-East Asian country, which shares borders with Bangladesh, India, China, Laos, and Thailand. Burmese food is interlaced with the cuisines of all its neighbours, but there is one dish all its own. Laphet thoke is a salad made with fermented tea leaves, fried peas, tomatoes and sprouts. Kyaw adds an Italian touch by blending the leaves into a pesto. The flavours and textures are brilliant – funky, bright and zesty – but I would love to see some tea leaves left whole as a signal to the origins of the dish.

It takes enormous courage to open a restaurant serving a little-known cuisine. I understand why Kyaw has tried to mitigate the risks by, for example, blending up tea leaves and serving dishes such as smashed avo and meatballs with mash.

I wouldn’t suggest he changes anything. That power lies with you. If you go to Ka Gyi and order tofu noodles and laphet thoke rather than risotto and burger, you’ll steer the two-month-old restaurant towards adventure, allowing Kyaw to wrap the culture he wants to share in a more confident embrace. He’s well on the way: the room is lovely with a wraparound banquette and arched lightboxes showing images of Myanmar’s attractions. Meanwhile, service is friendly but I’d welcome more insight into the dishes.

“Ka Gyi” refers to the first letter in the Burmese alphabet, as though Kyaw had called his restaurant “Capital A”. He named it such because he’s the first person to do Burmese quite like this in Melbourne. Hopefully, it’s a success – it deserves to be – and restaurants B, C and onwards will be inspired by his lead.

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