Eat Your Tea^TM: the unexpected and unfinished intercultural history of fermented tea leaf salad (laphet thoke)

Abstract

“Who would have thought that out of all the dishes on our menu, Americans would go nuts for a salad mixed with a dark savory paste of fermented tea?” The demand for Burma Superstar’s laphet thoke (fermented tea leaf salad) came initially as a surprise to San Francisco-restaurateur Desmond Tan. By 2018 the restaurant’s fermented tea leaf salad was the fourth most popular restaurant item in the country on Yelp. The dish’s nascent stardom is a dramatic departure from a colonial-era description of its key ingredient, laphet (fermented tea), as a “putrescent mass of smashed up leaves.” Witnessing the success of Burma Superstar’s laphet thoke, and a crescendo of interest in Burmese cuisine following Myanmar’s democratic reforms in 2012, an array of American restaurants has offered various versions of it, and dozens of food writers have been quick to publish recipes for it. In spite of the salad’s new-found cult following, laphet has remained rare for chefs and home cooks. This article focuses on laphet thoke, and argues that its origins, material properties, and culinary innovations have contributed to its popularity among American foodies. And, through the example of Tan’s adaptations of the salad and its key ingredient, this piece reveals the processes by which some exotic foods are modified and materialize as trendy fare.

Keywords:

• Myanmar (Burma)
• tea
• ethnic restaurateur
• foodies
• food innovation

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Carole Counihan, several anonymous reviewers, Laurel Kendall, Isabel Taube, Thein Thein Win, Sebastian Beckwith, Judy Hasinoff, and Matt Weiner for their valuable feedback to earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There is no single standardized romanization system for Burmese words, and many schemes are in use in the writings I examine. Therefore, unless indicated in the text, I adopt the romanization in Tan’s cookbook. Many food writers use his spellings, and the cookbook is central to my discussion of the innovations and reception of laphet thoke.

2 In 1989, the “Union of Burma” was officially changed to the “Republic of the Union of Myanmar.” In this article, I refer to “Myanmar” as the contemporary political entity, “Burma” for references predating 1989, and “Burmese” for the lowland majority population and its shared language.

3 Following Tan, other restaurateurs, and food writers, the words laphet thoke and laphet, and their translations into English as fermented tea leaf salad (tea leaf salad) and fermented tea leaves (fermented tea), are used interchangeably herein, regardless of their culinary innovations.

4 At the time this article was under review, Tan’s current and former restaurant workers won a settlement against Burma Superstar, after claiming in a class-action lawsuit that the restaurant empire violated labor standards and eliminated tips for back-of-the-house work (Phillips 2020, CB1).