It’s evident that Hsan Myint Aung builds his life around food. He has run Sun’s Burmese Kitchen with his wife, Erlinda, in Blacktown for close to 10 years, but even on his days off, he is out visiting markets and grocers, “always looking at all the ingredients”.
“Even when I’m not working … That’s why I know all the shops,” he says, rattling off a list of suburbs whose grocery geography he’s familiar with.
He enjoys every cuisine, but has fond memories of Hainanese chicken rice in Singapore. “I spent about 10 years in Singapore, when I was young,” he says. “I was working on the ships; that was about 40 years ago. I can tell you, I loved to eat chicken rice.”
And when I send him a photo of the rice vermicelli I’ve bought to make mohinga, he texts me back a photo of the brand he recommends, Golden Swallow; he tells me the one I bought, Wai Wai, is better for frying.
Mohinga, a lemongrass and fish soup, is about as robust as breakfast gets. It’s thickened with toasted ground rice, has a whopping 300ml of fish sauce, and is served with rice vermicelli, crispy fried shallots, eggs, lime, chilli, coriander and, at Sun’s Burmese Kitchen, a yellow split pea cracker.
Hsan Myint Aung, owner of Sun’s Burmese Kitchen in the Sydney suburb of Blacktown.
Hsan Myint Aung, owner of Sun’s Burmese Kitchen in the Sydney suburb of Blacktown. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian
Traditionally, the soup would also include finely sliced banana stem, used as a vegetable in parts of south and south-east Asia; nobody sells it here, but Hsan grows his own at home.
Have You Eaten, a map of Sydney in cuisines, lists Sun’s Burmese Kitchen as Sydney’s only Burmese restaurant. The Burman Kitchen in Surry Hills would once have been the second, but it closed permanently in February 2020.
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“Actually, it was very hard to open the restaurant,” Hsan Myint Aung tells me.
“Thirty years ago, when I came, there was nothing, no [Burmese] shops – but I would cook at the church, for the community, for family friends and things like that. After that they [said], you better open a restaurant!
“Burmese food is … everybody didn’t know about it. That was the real main thing – [it was] a very big challenge. I had to really struggle at the time.”
Guardian
Given how uncommon Burmese food still is in Australia, he takes particular pride in how faithfully his restaurant cleaves to the cuisine; dishes like danbauk, which he says is like a Burmese biryani, and kyay-o, a noodle soup with pork offal, are signature menu items.
“It’s really authentic, you know; I never modified it.”
These days, Sun’s has a dedicated following. Located in what was an LGA of concern during Sydney’s lockdown, the restaurant stopped offering even takeaway at the end of July. When their Facebook page announced they were reopening in early October, the comments were filled with overjoyed customers keen to satisfy their cravings again.
