(This venue is closed.) Three weeks later I was still picking away, one pinch of fish and garlic at a time.
The piscine ingredient is bummalo, also called Bombay duck for reasons open to debate; the accompaniments are crispy garlic, crispy onion, and chili flakes, which are matched in intensity by the pungency of the dried fish. Though reportedly dried bummalo is often crumbled over curries, I prefer to treat it as a nibble. As the latter, it's less like the bag of chips that you dig into repeatedly at a single sitting and more like the traditional British savory that clears the palate of all preceding flavors.
The other items shown here — featherback fish cake salad, tamarind pork, stir-fried corn, preserved shrimp salad, and preserved green tea leaf salad (each $5 or $6; the bummalo, too) — benefit from proper plating, if not heating, at home, though most were also sampled and photographed in the wild.
I picked up these items on various occasions at the door of an unremarkable private home on an unremarkable street in Sunnyside, Queens. Its online presence is understated, too, perhaps more than modestly, so I'll offer no more than a hint of where to go.
Takeout Burmese
Sunnyside, Queens
