Source : the age
Alfan Musthafa didn’t know much about Burmese food. Then the Warisan chef-patron went to the Global Food Markets in Woodridge with his sous, Laga “Bosco” Htoi.
If you haven’t been to this buzzy Sunday market in Woodridge, you’re missing out. It’s stacked full of fresh produce and boasts some brilliant street food options. Htoi’s aunty operates a food stall there.
“I tried her food and I was like, ‘Mate, this is so good’. I was blown away,” Musthafa says.
It was different to the stir fries and rice dishes he grew up cooking on his grandparents’ farm outside Jakarta.
“It’s a lot of noodles, curries, soups, that kind of thing. It’s different. They use more paprika powder, cumin, tomato.
“When I learned [later] to make the tofu [nway] noodles – the tofu sauce is actually chickpea, like a gravy. I’ve never seen something like this before. It’s so good.”
Musthafa – one of Brisbane’s hot young talents on the back of Warisan and his time at Luckies Kitchen and Ma Pa Me – also noted the food stall was packed with diners.
By mid-2024, 46,790 Myanmar-born people were living in Australia – many of them refugees – with 30,000 of those arriving between 2002 and 2022. Yet Burmese restaurants have been few and far between in Brisbane, at least.
Hence Sorai in Carina, which Musthafa and Htoi have opened with Min Hein Kyaw and Su Sabai Zaw, who are also both Burmese. It served its first diners in late June, in the Old Cleveland Road premises previously occupied by Scripted Cafe.
“We took care of the fit-out ourselves,” Musthafa says. “It was pretty much empty, with an empty kitchen and floor. We just wanted to keep it uncomplicated. We’re really happy with how it turned out.”
They should be. Sorai is a simple but warm, welcoming space of timber and brick, its defining features its splashes of vivid yellow tiling, rattan lampshades and Burmese umbrellas on the back wall. It’s comfortable and designed with locals in mind, and feels like it.
Overseeing the kitchen are Kyaw and Htoi. Their menu is billed as Burmese and modern Asian, with “more than 50 per cent of the dishes Burmese”.
There’s a bunch of familiar Thai and Indonesian dishes, in particular – pad Thai, massaman curry, mie goreng, som tum, that kind of thing – to help grease the wheels with curious locals.
The stars, though, are the kinds of comforting noodles, salads and curries that anyone whose travelled to Myanmar has likely encountered: kyay oh (vermicelli noodles with pork meatballs, pork offal, quail eggs, poached egg and choy sum, served dry or in a slow-cooked bone broth), mohinga (rice noodle fish soup with lemongrass, shallots and herbs), lahpet thoke (tea leaf salad with cabbage, tomato, crunchy beans, sesame seeds and crisped garlic) and a Burmese-style chicken curry served with roti.
“A lot of our herbs and spices are similar to China and India, in some respects, so people who don’t know Burmese cuisine can often find some familiarity there,” Kyaw says.
Sorai’s liquor licence has only just been approved so the drinks list is still coming together, but there’s Felons beer on tap, a bunch of Asian brews by the bottle, and a cocktail list compiled by Zaw that includes a tamarind whisky sour and a variation on a piña colada made with mango sticky rice.
“The reception has been amazing so far,” Musthafa says. “Really busy. And the support from the community has been huge – both people who live locally but also the Burmese community, which has been travelling from across Brisbane. We’ve easily seen familiar faces two or three times already.”
Open Sun-Thu 11am-9pm, Fri-Sat 11am-9.30pm.
850 Old Cleveland Rd, Carina, (07) 2143 6221.
Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
