This Burmese Chef Doesn’t Care If His Tea Leaf Salad Tastes Like Your Grandma's

Burmese tea leaf salad is the type of dish that will force you to stop whatever you are doing and take a couple of moments to admire the fact that you are about to chow down on a bunch of tea leaves for dinner.

Even more so when the dish is served the way it is at Daw Yee Myanmar Corner in Silver Lake: the pile of spinach-like fermented tea leaves is in the middle of the plate surrounded with tinier piles of minced cabbage, gently steamed yellow corn, diced tomatoes, fried yellow lentils and butter beans, fried bits of garlic, roasted peanuts.

When you mix it all up—along with its traditional dressing made from lime juice, garlic oil, and fish sauce—the extremely delicious, traditional dish is a study in textures and the small Southeast Asian country's geographic culture. The tiny, month-old restaurant is singlehandedly bridging one of LA's most popular neighborhoods with the suburban San Gabriel Valley, a region of Los Angeles with some of the most amazing Asian food in the country—a place that many of the city's residents know about yet few have experienced.

The hole-in-the-wall is situated in a strip mall next to a Neapolitan pizza shop (opened by the guy who delivered that pizza to Ellen Degeneres during the Oscars) and a five-minute walk from a French wine bar that is disguised as a Thai restaurant. Finding the perfect balance of maintaining Burmese cuisine's strong flavors while appeasing Silver Lake residents has not come easy for the restaurant's 35-year-old owner, Delyn Chow. This neighborhood's demographic values higher-quality ingredients and menu transparency over quantity, which is what Chow's SGV customers care about the most. It has been a trial-and-error process.

He has been rotating dishes from the SGV location to identify the ones that do well and the ones that flop. "Burmese people always compare my food to their mom's cooking, and our customers in Silver Lake compare my food with the salty, spicy, sour flavors of Thai restaurant down the street. It is a tough balance."

Chow has a bona fide LA food guy story. He was born in Myanmar and moved here when he was eight. Then, he went back to his country in 2010 to find his roots, which materialized through a love of Burmese food, after calling it quits in a successful career in lingerie sales. Fast-forward to now and his simple interpretation of his home country's cuisine is drawn from a lighter, California-style approach instilled by his mom, Daw Yee. It is based on "simple, good ingredients that are balanced, without having to be heavily oily, salty, or spicy," according to Chow. He's had some minor health issues in the past that inspired this philosophy.

There is one dish that has done surprisingly well in Silver Lake, as well as the SGV: mohinga.

This is another must-try when having Burmese food, as it is Myanmar's national dish. Chow simply labels it as a "catfish chowder with round rice noodles" on the menu, so depending on what kind of stuff you're into, this might sound like either the most delicious or most unpleasant thing on earth. "I worked so hard on our mohinga for three years and while we are now on a safe track with it even here in Silver Lake. Our Burmese customers will always say it is not as good as their mom's."

Despite all of this, Chow understands that making the decision to give in to his customer's requests of going bolder in flavor is a business decision, not a personal one. He has no immediate plans of crazily changing the recipes for his Silver Lake customers, especially his garam masala spice mix that he makes himself. However, he also understands that a restaurant belongs to the community.

"At the end of the day, I want people to come back and eat regularly and comfortably."