Mandalay, San Francisco

Several years back, a bunch of Burmese folks moved to San Francisco to get away from the increasingly oppressive regime at home.  Then they closed the borders, and they've been stuck here ever since.  Fortunately for us, some of them opened restaurants.

The most popular one of these is Burma Super Star on Clement Street, which regularly has lines.  This mystifies me, since after a couple visits to both, it's the same food as Mandalay, and Mandalay has better service and no lines.  Must be location ... Mandalay is up on California Street, in a far less foot-trafficked area.

The other advantage of it being less popular is that it's quiet and spacious ... a great place for a lunch or dinner meeting.

The first thing you want to do is order a beverage, and have fun with it.  This is ginger lemonade, which was very gingery.  Coconut juice (in coconut) comes similarly dressed up.

Then you definitely want to have either the Tea Salad or the Ginger Salad.  These arrive at your table as piles of separate ingredients, and are "tossed" for you by the server.  The result is a very distinctive assortment of both flavors and textures which is pure Southeast Asia.

They also offer a few different kinds of rice, including coconut rice and fried rice.  Get these as sides, they're surprisingly tasty.

On the down side, Mandalay is a different restaurant at lunch than it is at dinner.  Dinner service takes a long time as they make up each dish specially for you from raw ingredients; definitely not a place to go if you have somewhere to be that night.  At lunch, they rush things a bit, resulting in some dishes being reminicent of a $4-a-plate Cantonese diner, such as this one:

This is the Rangoon Three Ingredients, which was a completely different dish at dinner than at lunch.  Here, at lunch, it was underseasoned and undercooked.

As usual for Southeast Asian restaurants, the desserts range from the bizzare to the unappetizing, so I've avoided them so far.  But make sure to go there for dinner sometime you're in the Richmond!