Mandalay Style Restaurant, Peninsular Plaza

We've never explored Burmese food much previously so this was a step out of our usual zone at Mandalay Style Restaurant (#B1-01 Peninsula Plaza, 111 North Bridge Road). Pretty much everything we ordered looked like a game of chance because of our lack of familiarity but on hindsight, we did know a tiny bit and there're some similarities we could relate to Thai food.

Like pork organ doke htoe. From what I could find out, these were supposed to be pork parts on sticks? Anyways, this rendition was in what appeared to be sweet soya sauce broth. There were parts like tripe, liver, ears, tongue, intestines and some which I couldn't identify. The braised offal were pretty tender, notably so for those pig's ears. Liver was dry and powdery but that texture/flavour had it's appeal.

This was a corn and tea leaf salad - the tea leaf being the same fermented stuff as laphet thoke. Tangy, earthy and a bit of heat that I didn't see coming.

Ordered a rice platter so that we could sample what they had. Clockwise from bottom

• laphet rice - Rice with the laphet. Flavour's kinda similar to the salad with much less intensity.
• pone yay gyi rice - I read it's made of fermented horse gram beans but it tasted like olives. Like a less salted version of a Thai olive fried rice. There's sliced chilli and onions in it.
• rice with beans and peanut oil - This in our opinion was the best tasting. It's as described, rice with beans, peanut oil and some salt. Don't know if there was anything else but the simplicity was oustanding. I could come back just for this.
• pyay rice - There's some spicy crispy stuff in it. And coriander too even though we told them not to include coriander for every item we ordered.

There's also a whole bunch of spicy anchovies + other crispies in the middle which was not bad tasting if one could deal with the heat.

The menu listed this as Mandalay styled mango salad. Imagine a pretty spicy som tam mamuang minus the sugar, lime and fish sauce. That was pretty much it. The heat from this salad took a little bit of time to build up and ended up pretty potent.