Ever Eat a Tea Leaf?

Golden Triangle Restaurant is in the genteel center of Uptown Whittier, cheek-by-jowl with the art galleries and the collectors’ bookstores, five minutes from City Hall and a short walk from the Whittier College quad. Here’s the kind of relaxed street life you’re not supposed to find within a couple thousand miles of this place, leafy and pleasant if a little too cute, a college town without a Benneton or a chain restaurant in sight. Writer M.F.K. Fisher grew up a few blocks from here; so did Pat Nixon.

Uptown Whittier might be the last place you’d expect to find Golden Triangle, whose name evokes seemingly inappropriate poppy-field reveries and which is probably the first restaurant in the Southland to specialize in the exotic cooking of Burma. But Golden Triangle is one of the nice joints, family-run, with tablecloths, bright travel posters and clean, comfortable booths, tastefully lit, and soft hits playing from a corner of the room.

Though the country of Burma is apparently not much of a restaurant destination these days, unless tired roast beef and watery curries are what excite your palate, Burmese cuisine is actually sort of hip in the Bay Area--half a dozen Burmese restaurants flourish, and there’s even a new Burmese place just down the block from Berkeley gastro-temple Chez Panisse. The cognoscenti there compare notes on homemade tofu and queer jellied desserts, on curried fish chowders and unusual salads whose main ingredient is pickled tea leaves.

It makes a certain amount of sense that Burma, snuggled between Thailand, Bangladesh and China, would have some interesting cooking of its own, ex-English colony or no. Burma is in the right neighborhood.

“Those restaurants in San Francisco are all run by Chinese from Burma,” one of Golden Triangle’s owners says with a dismissive snort. “This one here is run by all-Burmese people.”

The flavors at Golden Triangle are clearer, more focused than those of its Bay Area peers, alive with citrus and ginger and the musk of fermented shrimp paste, nutty with roasted beans and toasted coconut, crunchy with peanuts and fried garlic. (The owners grow some otherwise unobtainable Burmese ingredients in their own back yards, notably the sour vegetable that is the star of the strong-tasting chin baung kyaw , possibly the one dish here that might be too much for most American palates.)

Instead of the pages and pages of Chinese food that fill out Bay Area Burmese menus, Golden Triangle serves most of the old Thai standbys (and supposedly some Laotian dishes, which are similar to Isaan-style Thai food, though they seem to have taken them off the menu). If you order a couple of Burmese things, somebody will probably come out of the kitchen and ask if you’ve ever been to Burma, then maybe send a plate of fried red-bean/ginger patties out to the table, or an order of delicious batter-fried squash. And there is a photo supplement to the menu that shows most of the really good dishes, which makes something called htaminh baungh almost a tangible concept.

The national dish of Burma is a garbanzo-flour-thickened fish chowder called moh hin gha , shot though with noodles, mellowed with coconut milk, and Golden Triangle does a fantastic catfish version with a strong, clear fish flavor, the best soup in the house.

There is also lap pad thoke , which has a dollop of chewy dried shrimp, a handful of toasted legumes, and a base of winy, pickled tea-leaves that have the consistency of stewed collard greens and the caffeine kick of a double espresso. Nga-phe thoke is a delicious tart salad whose ingredients include slivered onion and tender shreds of house-made fishcake.

Burma is not far from India, and some of the food at Golden Triangle is quite similar to what you might find at an Indian restaurant: fried turnovers, sumusas (like samosas), filled with curried potatoes and served with a Thai sweet and sour cucumber salad; beya kyaw , split pea-onion fritters that taste like a Gujarati snack; rich fried pancakes, paratha , served with a bowl of fragrant chicken curry. At lunchtime, the restaurant serves a terrific sort of biryani -style rice dish called dun buk htaminh , cooked with cashews, raisins, vegetables and spices, topped with a quarter baked chicken.

And then there is an incredible ginger salad, biting shreds of the herb tossed with coconut, fried garlic, fried yellow peas, peanuts and sesame seeds, whose fugal crunchiness is quite unlike anything you’ve ever tasted yet somehow familiar, like an ancient prototype of exotic cocktail-party snacks. If Burmese food ever became as popular as Thai, ginger salad is probably what people would line up for at carnival booths. If the world ever gave it a chance, ginger salad might have the universal appeal of a Big Mac.

Golden Triangle Restaurant, 7011 S. Greenleaf Ave., Whittier, (310) 945-6778. Open daily 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $14-20.