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Cheap Eats: Rangoon Burmese Restaurant
We do our best to eat our way through the menu at Chinatown's Rangoon Restaurant.
Cheap Eats: Rangoon Burmese Restaurant
Rangoon Restaurant (112 N. 9th St.) has a good selection of rice plates available for lunch, at the beyond-reasonable price point of $6.50 (tack on an extra quarter for beef). If one was looking to do a “cheap eats” review, the smart thing to do would probably be to order and review one of those.
But I can only be what I am, which is to say, “kind of a hog and not good with limitations.” The lunch special menu provides bargain hunters with 18 choices, from bog standard Chinese-American takeout staples to a number of vegetarian options. But only one of those options (pork with mango pickled curry) really piqued my interest, and once I moved on to browse the rest of the menu, there was no turning back.
We decided instead to sample “cheap” options by trolling the appetizers, salads, and noodles. First up: an obligatory order of thousand layer bread with vatana dip ($5.75). The vatana dip brought preternaturally creamy white beans, just the tiniest bit sweet, very mild, and topped with crispy fried onions. The bread will be familiar to anyone who’s had paratha or roti—crackly and chewy, it made for a delicious and comfortable starter. (A spicier accompaniment would be quite welcome, but was not necessarily missed.)
We also sampled the firecracker lentil fritters ($5.50), which were fried very hard but still retained moist, tender middles flecked with green chilis, onions, and herbs. With mild heat and a side of tamarind-chili sauce, these disappear like hush puppies and will make you wish Rangoon was still open around last call.
My dining partner ordered the “calamari a la Burma” ($7.50), a tossed salad of squid, tomatoes, lettuce, onion, and peanuts, with a dressing involving ground dried shrimp and bright lime. It was a better choice than my let thoke, or cold Burmese noodle ($7.50), which came across a bit bland and pasty to me. It is worth noting here that the offerings and descriptions vary from the sit-down menu to the take-out menu. The take-out menu mentions toasted chickpea flour, omitted from the description I read prior to ordering, which may account for the slightly pasty texture coating the room-temperature wheat noodles. Additions like red onion faded entirely into the background, and only cilantro truly asserted itself.
The portion size of the noodle dish, however, was spot on, and given the flavors present in the other dishes we tried, I wouldn’t hesitate to give a different noodle dish here a shot.
When our waiter returned to ask “Anything else?” in that call-and-response way that anticipates an answer of “No thank you, just the check, please,” I interrupted the rhythm by blurting out, “Spicy string beans!” And so lunch was a bit extended. I had let my boyfriend eat most of my noodles, and was now suffering some nostalgia for the dry-fried string beans I used to order in Burmese spots in San Francisco.
Rangoon’s spicy string beans ($9.95) were quite different from the ones I had in mind, but I was happy with the choice nonetheless. A bit salty on its own, and with occasional bites of serious heat, the dish cries out for plenty of white rice, which was thankfully provided. I had hoovered down several bites before realizing that what I thought at first glance were short cuts of green bean were actually chopped chilis that exactly mimicked the beans’ width and color. The occasional large piece of garlic was also very potent, adding a bite all its own. The variation kept the dish interesting throughout.
A Burmese restaurant is a rare beast in Philadelphia, and I found this one solid. Our meal here, of course, wouldn’t count as a cheap lunch to anyone outside the 1%, but only because we ordered way too much for two normal humans. It should be noted that we were so full leaving Rangoon that we ended up skipping dinner entirely. If you stick to lunch specials, or any of the numerous salads and rice or noodle dishes, you could get out of here for under $10 even including tax and tip. And no matter what, you're sure to get a meal that's a little outside the ordinary for this area.
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