underground gourmet quick bite

Little Myanmar’s Burmese Pancake Is Street Food Worth Sitting Down For

Little Myanmar’s savory Burmese pancake is griddled, filled, folded, and sliced for easy consumption. Photo: Adam Friedlander

When your first restaurant is a cubbyhole in a Jackson Heights subway station, a six-table East Village storefront with outdoor seating feels like a major expansion. For the family behind Queens’s Yun Café & Asian Mart and the new Little Myanmar, the Manhattan outpost has given them not only ground-floor exposure but the chance to augment their menu with street food, a category they thought would befit a neighborhood that has been bereft of Burmese cuisine since Village Mingala closed in 2010. One particularly notable addition, the Burmese pancake, is listed under appetizers; in its homeland, the rice-flour crêpe goes by the name lan thaye mote, and according to chef-owner Thidar Kyaw, it is otherwise known as a gangster dosa or gangster snack because of the milieu in which it’s eaten (often for breakfast). At Little Myanmar, you can get it with or without beaten egg cooked onto the surface of the lacy batter as it sizzles. After that comes cabbage, tomato, cilantro, Thai green chiles, a dusting of Burmese garam masala, and what Kyaw calls the most important part: fried chickpeas. Say what you will about Burmese gangsters — they love their legumes.

Thidar Kyaw and her daughter, Yun Naing, outside their new East Village restaurant. Photo: Adam Friedlander
Fried chickpeas are the star of the dosa-like street food. Photo: Adam Friedlander

150 E. 2nd St., nr. Ave. A

Little Myanmar Has Street Food Worth Sitting Down For