One of NyoNyo Lin’s cherished childhood memories is eating fish soup with her grandmother back in Burma. Not just any soup, but mohinga, perhaps the most famous dish in all of Burmese cuisine. It’s packed with slippery rice noodles that absorb the dense broth so that they become a thick ball of divinely comforting mush. Shards of frittery yellow beans add a savory crunch, and a hard-boiled egg breaks into chunks, the yolk making the soup even richer. It’s a meal in and of itself.
Lin came to Milwaukee from the Southeast Asian country now known as Myanmar in 2005, five years after her mother, Ni Ni – both of them via a refugee camp in Thailand. It’s been their dream since settling here to open a restaurant featuring recipes from NyoNyo’s grandmother, who ran a restaurant in Burma.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
That dream has become reality as Ni Burmese, a new restaurant inside the KinetiK building in Bay View. Its modern aesthetic includes lots of natural light, blond wood and a long turquoise banquette. The room is centered by a wall mural of a fisherman in a traditional wooden boat on Myanmar’s Irrawaddy River. Another wall is decorated with colorful Burmese puppets.
Their homeland’s food, as expressed in Ni Ni’s cooking, features bits and pieces of Thai, Indian and Chinese cuisines but is all its own. The classic bowl of mohinga (anglicized on this menu as mont hin gar, $10) is soulful comfort, and there’s much more where that came from.
An example is the fermented tea leaf salad ($13), which I’m tempted to call a kind of slaw because of the crisp cabbage base. But its flavor – pungent, sour, smoky – is unfamiliar and so good. I love the crunch of the fried components – mung beans and slivered garlic.
Kat kyi kaik ($15-$18) is one of 16 stir-fries – I shared it with two friends and wish I’d kept it all to myself. The silky fried flat noodles remind me for a second of pad thai, but they’re lighter and less saucy, with mung bean sprouts and yellow peas tossed in.
Another dish I really like, the lamb curry ($18), is rich and oily but not heavy, and not particularly spicy but perked up with a subtle clove note. I’m still thinking about it – and those flat fried noodles. I’ll be plumbing the depths of this 65-item menu for months to come.
Ni Burmese
2140 S. Kinnickinnic Ave.
414-374-1546
$5-$35
THERE IS NO EXACT DATA on the number of Burmese who have settled in Milwaukee. Andrew Trumbull, of the nonprofit Burmese Rohingya Community of Wisconsin, estimates they make up about 1-2% of the population. That includes ethnic minority groups such as the Rohingya. In 2020, a Rohingya family started a food truck, Taste Amir’s Roti, serving dishes from Burma and Malaysia. Last spring, they added a brick-and-mortar location on the South Side. It offers many of the truck favorites and more.
At their small brick-and-mortar, there’s table seating and a large menu to peruse. I could spend a visit just eating roti (a flaky, layered flatbread of Indian influence). They have versions where the bread is stuffed with cheese, meats, egg or sardines. It can also be eaten with the simple and satisfying dal (lentil) curry. In Malay, rice is called nasi. Like roti, it has many different applications. Nasi goreng is fried rice (seasoned in a sweet soy sauce) with stir-fried meat (chicken, beef) and vegetables.
It’s delicious – and even better with a fried, runny-yolk egg on top. Another traditional Malay rice dish, nasi lamek – cooked in coconut milk and pandan leaf – is richer, and I like the cool, crisp, spicy accompaniments (roasted peanuts, cucumber slices and sambal, a spicy Indonesian chili paste. A Thai influence shows up in dishes like tom yum (yam is the Malaysian spelling), a very aromatic hot and sour soup that’s bright orange-red. Among the various additions, I like the tom yam with shrimp and a side of white rice to make it heartier.
A mile north of Amir’s is Khan Aseya, a Burmese restaurant that opened in summer 2024. It is adjacent to the owner’s other business, a small Asian grocery called Myanmar Shop. The menu at Khan Aseya – known as “Mom’s Kitchen”– has touches of Malaysian, Thai, Indonesian and Chinese. Ask anyone who works here what to order and they’ll point you to the maggi noodles – stir-fried with carrots, cabbage and a leafy green called sawi. They’re chewy and firm, with a warm, sweet garam masala kick.
The restaurant does a Malaysian take on veggie fried rice in the omelet-wrapped nasi goreng pattaya. Its tangy sweet-sour sauce ties it all together. The nasi lamek is also very good – coconut rice with fried anchovies, roasted peanuts, hard-boiled egg and the fiery sambal chili paste. If you see candol – a thick coconut milk soup with bright-green pandan jelly mixed into it – in the cold case with single-serving desserts, you need to try it. The slightly floral, grassy pandan jelly adds a chewy consistency (think dense gelatin) to this creamy, sweet dessert soup – a refreshing end to the meal.
