SUNNYSIDE - Tin May Htay misses fresh food as much as she misses her parents and her friends. “In Burma, everything is organic, natural and affordable,” she reminisces, sitting in her small quiet living room in Sunnyside. “Here, organic is very expensive.” I’d first met Htay (Ma Htay to her friends), a shy Burmese jewelry-production manager with a cheerful smile, at the Myanmar Baptist Church Fun Fair a few weeks earlier, where her mohinga—a thick, ginger-scented spicy fish noodle soup—was a popular pick. Despite the stifling August heat, the mohinga was flying out of the pots in her stall. Customers not only went back for seconds, they bought extra to take home.

In the world of the Myanmar Baptist Church, Ma Htay’s reputation as a cook precedes her. She not only contributes to the Fun Fair, she is a long-time member of the Women’s Cooking Committee, which consists of 20 women who share cooking duties for afterservice meals. Each Sunday, they feed up to a hundred people who attend services. Sometimes, the post-service meal is a simple noodle soup like mohinga; other times, it is an elaborate multiple-dish affair. The meal is a production requiring a well-choreographed effort of five or six women, each doing one part in her home, with the group assembling the dish or meal at church right after the service.

After I tasted mohinga at the Fun Fair, I sought a similar soup in Queens with little success. An estimated 1,500 to 3,000 immigrants from Burma (also known as Myanmar) live in Elmhurst, Flushing, Jackson Heights and Sunnyside, according to the United States Census Report and the Burma Project, an initiative of the Open Society Institute, which monitors political and economic conditions in Myanmar. The actual number may be greater, with the uncertainty stemming from the very nature of the country in question. The Union of Myanmar consists of 14 different nations and some 135 ethnic groups. Regardless of the number of immigrants from Myanmar living in Queens, the borough has no dedicated Burmese restaurants or food carts. Excellent Thai restaurant in Flushing, which serves a few Burmese dishes along with Thai and Malaysian fare, is the only option. The owner, known as Ma Sophie, says she will prepare other Burmese dishes on request, but a customer must know to ask for them.

One reason for the cuisine’s obscurity may be the inherent Burmese cultural aversion to eating meals outside the home. Burmese restaurants are rare even in Myanmar, according to Irene Wong, a Myanmar native and Southeast- Asian cuisine expert living in Manhattan. One finds restaurants serving other Asian cuisines in Myanmar, but only a few establishments serve traditional Burmese food. Those of us lucky enough to have experienced it know that the cuisine, like the country itself, represents a unique integration of food traditions and flavor profiles from the neighboring countries of Thailand, India and China.

“We usually have six or seven dishes with rice,” says Bryan Mon, Ma Htay’s older son, a twenty-something CUNY sociology student who acts as his mother’s translator. “There are usually a thin water-based soup, two or three curries of vegetables and meats, some fried vegetables or a salad and condiments.” By curry, Bryan means a Burmese curry, which is defined as any dish with a base of onion, garlic, ginger, chili and balachan, a fermented paste made of pounded dried shrimp and oil. In Myanmar, salads are considered fast foods, often served with a cup of tea to household guests.

If cooking six or seven dishes every day sounds like a big production, try assembling ingredients for them. “Food shopping is a whole weekend activity,” says Lynn, a Burmese paralegal who preferred not to disclose her last name. Lynn has lived in Queens since the late 1990s. “A lot of Burmese families in Queens start their shopping in Elmhurst at the Hong Kong Market for some Thai and Chinese ingredients, make another stop in Jackson Heights for the Indian ingredients, and then a third stop at the American supermarkets for their kids who want Western food.” If fish is on the menu for dinner, it’s off to Tasnim Grocery on Skillman Avenue. “The fish are frozen,” says Lynn, “but they taste like the fish from back home.”

Even with multi-destination shopping trips and the global economy, some Burmese ingredients are still hard to find. Mohinga requires banana shoots, which can be found frozen in most Asian supermarkets in Queens, but many immigrants from Myanmar fondly recall the fresh banana shoots widely available in their home country. Roselle, a variety of hibiscus with sorrel-like tartness, must be ordered from Hmong farmers in Minnesota. (The Hmong were relocated from Laos to the American Midwest in the 1970s under a political refugee program). Other ingredients, such as pickled tea leaves, can only be obtained through homebased food dealers who do not advertise outside the Burmese community.

On a cool October evening, Lynn and I press the buzzer of an upper-floor apartment on a bustling street in Sunnyside. After a brief exchange over the intercom with Lynn in Burmese, a small woman in a T-shirt and lungyi (the traditional Burmese sarong) answers the door. Inside the narrow hallway are racks of groceries clustered around a large refrigerator. The hallway leads to a living room with a leather couch and more racks of food lining the walls.

A young boy bounces on the sofa with his eyes glued to a cartoon on the television set while a man, also wearing a T-shirt and lungyi, clicks away on a laptop. The man observes suspiciously as Lynn picks up packages of pickled mangoes and tea leaves. In an economy where supermarkets and grocery stores are the norm, the strictly cash business has the secrecy of a clandestine drug deal. While this may seem strange to most of us, Lynn says that the home-based grocery store is a time-honored tradition throughout Myanmar. Later, I learn that the products sold in these stores cost many times what they would in Myanmar, but for many Burmese in Queens, there are few places to obtain these ingredients.

“These packaged tea leaves are not as good as the fresh ones we buy at home,” says Ma Htay, when we show her what we had just bought from the underground grocer. “In Burma, pickled tea leaves are young and tender. The ones they sell here are tough and old.” Yet she insists that Queens is just like Burma, only colder, and comments that in Burma she had more time to cook and shop for food. “There, I was a housewife,” she says. “Now I prepare most of the meals on my weekends.” I ask if her husband ever helps, and all the women in the room rock with laughter. “In Burmese culture, men don’t cook,” explains Lynn. “But that is slowly changing. When I was growing up, the family always broke in two parts. The women were in the kitchen and the dining area, getting the meal together. The men were in the living room among themselves. They came together at mealtimes.” So how does a Burmese woman with a full-time job and a husband who doesn’t know his way around the kitchen manage? She orders takeout.

Salads are Su Su Tints’s specialty. She sells them from her boutique on Skillman Avenue. “I am not a professional,” she says humbly. “But I make the salads and everyone says they are good and that I should sell them here.” She also sells food that her mother prepares. “My mother makes mohinga in parts,” says Tint. “When you get home, you just put the whole thing in hot water and assemble it like instant noodle packages.”

Tint, a well-polished diminutive former Japanese translator and hotel-sales representative, came to this country in search of better education and more opportunities for her children. She now owns a ladies’ clothing boutique, which she runs with her younger sister, Kay. The two women chirp like a pair of birds and often answer questions for each other. “We came from a family of cooks, each with her own specialty. My other sister is very good with curries and Burmese biryani, which is made with short grain rice. The chicken is cooked with the rice, so it’s very tender,” Kay says.

Although prepared food is not her main revenue source, Tint plans to grow the business once her mother retires from nursing and has more time to cook. The simple menu caters to a mostly Burmese clientele, although anyone can order. “The customers order the food two days ahead and pick it up from the shop,” she explains, proudly displaying a copy of the menu. I ask Tint about the noodle salad she made for the Myanmar Fun Fair, where I met Ma Htay, and she squeals with delight. “I have a surprise for you,” she says gleefully. “I brought salads for everyone!” She disappears to the back of the shop and, after much clanging, returns with salads on four small Styrofoam plates. Once everyone has a plate in hand, she announces that she is keeping a vegetarian diet that day because her husband is observing the Buddhist principle of “not taking a life.”

Both Tint and Ma Htay are of Christian faith, married to Buddhist husbands, which is so common that many Burmese women are adept at making vegetarian versions of traditional meat dishes. “My husband doesn’t eat beef because of his Buddhist faith,” says Ma Htay. “If we have beef for dinner, I have to make him something else, and that is how I show my love for him.” Ma Htay believes that her church and her husband’s temple help them stay connected to her community, and by extension, their friends and families back home in Myanmar. She proudly tells me that the Fun Fair raised a lot of money for victims of the recent cyclone Nargis. Her husband’s temple also held festivals to benefit the cyclone relief workers. “I am very happy that I can contribute,” she says. “Just like showing my love for my husband, it’s how I show my love for my community.”

RESOURCES:

Restaurants:

Excellent Thai, 36-50 Main St., Flushing, 718-886-8972

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