Sara Jenkins might have been initially inspired by the porchetta trucks outside Florence and Rome when she opened her East Village sandwich shop, Porchetta, but in the years since, she’s imposed no national boundaries on the street-food staple. The succulent meat has made its way into such specials as Mexican tacos, Vietnamese bánh mì, and starting tonight, the Burmese noodle soup called kaukswe, a variant (some say progenitor) of Thailand’s beloved khao soi.
Like that seminal soup, this one has both boiled and fried egg noodles and a rich coconut-milk curry, and is topped with bean sprouts, cilantro, chiles, and lime. Jenkins models her version after the many bowls she slurped in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, family home of her cousin and Porchetta partner Matt Lindemulder, whose parents lived in Rangoon when he was an infant. Starting tonight and every Wednesday for the foreseeable future, $10 bowls will be dished up from 6 to 10 p.m. at Porchetta.
