Just outside the entrance to Yun Café & Asian Mart are two small folding tables, at which I can’t exactly recommend sitting, and not only because of the pandemic. Yun Café, which opened in August, is subterranean, at the bottom of a set of stairs leading to the Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue subway station. Even in a more relaxed era, most people would find the atmosphere lacking, although it’s fun to be reminded that the city contains a whole universe underground; the café faces a tiny bodega and is within spitting distance (but don’t, and wear a mask) of a barbershop.
Luckily, you can sit at other tables upstairs, en plein air on a lively plaza, or take your food to go. Most everything here travels well; without much of a kitchen, the tiny café is limited largely to sandwiches and cold salads, specifically Burmese salads, which are the clear draw of the place. Yun’s married owners, Tin Ko Naing and Thidar Kyaw, are from Myanmar, where salad is a pillar of the cuisine; the year-round average temperature is eighty degrees.
You could liken Burmese food to cuisines that use similar ingredients and flavors, including Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, and Chinese. But it might be more useful to home in on what sets it apart: laphet, for one, fermented tea leaves that are eaten instead of brewed. For Yun’s version of laphet thoke, or tea-leaf salad, the leaves, darkest green and imparting of a deep vegetal funk, are mixed with shredded cabbage, thinly sliced red and green tomatoes, coins of garlic so caramelized they look like golden raisins, roasted soy nuts and peanuts, sesame oil, snips of fiery green chili, dried shrimp, fish sauce, and lemon juice. Umami on umami on umami.
Brightly astringent fermented ginger replaces the laphet in another salad. In others you’ll find shreds of tart green papaya, or green mango; a tangle of thick yellow egg noodles or white-rice vermicelli; shaggy morsels of chicken or neat cubes of tripe; wedges of house-made tofu or fish cake. A samosa “salad” turns out to be more of a soup, for which the tricornered pastries are smashed open, mashed potato and chickpea spilling out, topped with mint and cabbage, and bathed in a thick golden broth, heady with garam masala, that gets warmed on a hot plate if you want to eat it right away and packed in a separate container if you don’t. The same goes for the lemongrass-and-chili-laced fish stock that’s the base of the mohinga, a noodle soup that’s considered Myanmar’s national dish and is traditionally served for breakfast.
Naing and Kyaw, whose twenty-three-year-old daughter, Yun, helps run Yun Café, did not intend to open a Burmese restaurant, least of all during a global pandemic. In Myanmar, they owned a restaurant and, later, a tea shop, but in 2008 they left for Singapore, where Naing worked as an engineer. In 2014, Kyaw immigrated to the U.S., got her real-estate license, and took over a cheap lease in a shopping arcade in Jackson Heights, selling mostly drygoods imported from Myanmar. Business was never great, because of the isolated location, and when her husband and daughter followed her, two years ago, they talked about looking for a space with better foot traffic. It wasn’t until May of this year that they found one they could afford.
“Everybody around us was, like, ‘This does not sound like a good idea, everybody’s struggling, people are closing, and you want to open? No one is taking the trains,’ ” Yun told me recently. “But things will go back to normal one day,” she said. “If we can just hold up until then, we should be fine.” Initially, they planned to focus on coffee, smoothies, sandwiches—“good for rushing,” Yun explained. It was Kyaw’s idea to add Burmese salads, which made Yun and her father skeptical at first. “We were, like, ‘Nobody knows Burmese food.’ But then we thought, Let’s have a little corner,” she said. “Then we opened the store, and people were coming for the Burmese food.” (Burmese salads and soups $3-$15.) ♦
