Yellow Pa Taut: The Burmese Restaurant You Haven't Been To

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Coconut chicken noodle soup.

​Yellow Pa Taut is the city's other Burmese restaurant. It's quirky and remote, socked away on a gastronomically unsung side of town, some might even say the wrong side altogether: The front doors swing open less than 100 feet from the Hall of Justice and its neighboring stretch of run-down bail bondsman offices. Jurors, lawyers, and police officers mob the joint for weekday lunches. At other times, the server and cook -- inevitably blasting house music and checking up on Facebook between trips to the sparsely populated tables -- may outnumber the customers.

Last weekend, we enjoyed our second visit, tearing through a meal that, like many sequels, was bigger and even badder than the inspiring inaugural experience -- a quick bite a year or so ago. Over-ordering is a personal problem we're not afraid to cop to. When mid-afternoon rolls around and we haven't yet eaten anything of substance, we err compulsively on the side of excess. We picked out four dishes and left with a large sack brimming with take-out containers.

The lap patthouk, or tea leaf salad, was an orchestra of edible percussion: hard roasted peanuts, crunchy fried yellow split peas, some other larger, greener legume or pulse, chewy little shrimp-like things, and slippery greens tossed in citrus and spice -- a rattling spread of off-the-wall textures. Matmos could make a whole album sampling the munching of this salad alone. There was also kyat the palatha, wedges of slightly undercooked paratha accompanied by a bowl of salty, rich chicken curry for dipping, se gyet khauk se', oily noodle ribbons and slices of pork saturated with the intense, nutty flavor of perfectly browned garlic whisked from the heat at just the right second, and finally, a goat curry, the weekend special. The curry was chocolate black, thin and murky, pooling around dark hunks of bone-riddled meat like Precambrian swamp water lapping against moss-slicked stones. Reddish oil flamed in a ring around the edge of the sauce, sloshing ominously up the sides of the bowl with each dip of the spoon. Carved into smaller pieces, the goat was dark red on the inside, stringy yet soft and devilishly gamy. We gnawed, slurped, and thought of oil spills and (weirdly) Macbeth. There was something more than slightly evil about it -- as if it were the product of a dark rite. Antacids -- the feeble pedestrian "good" magic -- were no match.

We get a little scared when we open the fridge and see the leftovers still burbling away through a cylinder of fogged-up plastic. It was really good. We're going to eat it, we swear -- one of these days.

Yellow Pa Taut 15 Boardman Place (at Bryant), 701-8188