Outside of Rau Ram in Yangon. Photo courtesy of Rau Ram.
Kevin Ching: I'd come over to visit Ivan [Pun] a couple times. My understanding was that Yangon was a brand-new emerging market. You could really tell that there was nothing here. The food scene was a desert, so it was clear there was an opportunity to do forward-thinking things and be the first to do that.
Clockwise from left: chả gio crispy fried spring rolls, rau răm som tam, "bánh xèo" tacos, stir-fried morning glory with garlic, Vietnamese chicken rice, lemongrass chicken curry, thịt kho caramelized pork belly sliders, Manila clam risotto. Photo courtesy of Rau Ram.
Ching: Progress has been slow. I came here two or three years ago and some things are different now, but many others are still the same. It still very much feels like it's developing.Andre Lense: Oh, H&M is here. They produce their clothes here, but the people can't afford them. It's very interesting that even these really cheap retailers cannot sell their products here, because the income levels are still so low. They've all registered their trademarks, but they haven't actually arrived yet.
Lemongrass chicken curry with taro, galangal, and makrut lime. Photo courtesy of Rau Ram.
Ching: After the first year, there was a new government, a new leader. And there was kind of a crescendo, not just in the government, but in the society and the food scene as well. Hope was in there air. There was this feeling that change was coming and money was coming and investment was coming. So, I think a lot of people entered the F&B business with very limited experience and expertise. We've seen a lot of restaurants pop up and a lot close back down. There was a little bit of a bubble burst—a retraction, if you will. I think there wasn't as much money to go around as we thought there would start to be. We learned a few lessons from that.
Ching: We had an Italian restaurant called La Carovana that we closed. I was immensely proud of that one. It was really such a nice restaurant, but it was a little bit too early and a little bit too upmarket.
Australian sirloin steak tartare with lemongrass, Thai basil, and lemon caper aioli, with fresh herb salad and toasted baguette. Photo courtesy of Rau Ram.
Ching: And we know that. We were counting on a Burmese middle class that would grow a little bit faster than it currently is, combined with rising tourism, and just more interest in spending and going out in general. That was the intention. Some days during the week, business can be very slow, but we have good nights as well.There has to be something of a steep learning curve here, given that there isn't really a precedent in Yangon for what you're doing.
Ching: Right now, our strategy is a diversifying one. I think when you're in a developing market like this, you have the opportunity to try a lot of different things. Not everything is going to work. In a lot of ways, Myanmar is a great incubator for these ideas. These are things that maybe I wouldn't have been able to do in other cities that are more saturated. We get to try them here, polish them, and see what works and what doesn't work. Later, you can maybe think about what might work outside of Myanmar, but for now we're concentrating on here.
Seared scallops, lightly seared in soy and brown butter on green sambal noodles with makrut lime and roasted peanuts. Photo courtesy of Rau Ram.
Ching: We just opened Paribawga Showroom and Café, which showcases pieces from our furniture label. The name actually means "furniture" in Burmese. All the furniture is locally made with indigenous wood and it's beautiful.You build furniture, you organize events, you make tacos. That's a pretty broad range for one umbrella company, don't you think?
Ching: True, but all these things are creative in some way. We have a lot of diverse talent in the company. Paribawga Cafe is located within an actual furniture shop. The concept is we're serving upscale vegetarian small plates along with standard bakery fare. It's very much on-trend with what's happening elsewhere in the world.Asian fusion, combination spaces, pop-ups… a lot of these are things you can find elsewhere, but not here.
Ching: Some of these trends are years old in other parts of the world, but in Yangon they're very new, very progressive. We pride ourselves on doing that as much as we can with each of our concepts. We've still got more projects in the works.There's more?
Ching: Oh yeah, there's more.Lense: We haven't had a break for the last 16 months.
Vietnamese chicken rice: shredded chicken with rau ram and onion salad served with chicken fat rice, nước chấm dipping sauce, and bean sprouts. Photo courtesy of Rau Ram.
Ching: [Laughs] We do, we do. We're launching Locale, which is gonna be a health-focused casual concept. I think a lot of people who come here struggle to find healthy food to eat.
Lense: Basically, you check out the farm where it's produced, so you have a better sense of what you can put on a plate. Some suppliers, you know straight away that they're questionable. Then you have other people that are a lot more passionate about their projects.Ching: Organic certification is really sketchy all over Asia. But as a chef, you can clearly see which produce is more organic, just by how they grow, the shapes, the textures, usually the size, and sometimes the flavor as well. You can tell, but it's still a do-the-best-you-can kind of thing. We're not going to advertise as being completely organic. That would be impossible.
Calamansi Mojito. Photo courtesy of Rau Ram.
Ching: It's a constant struggle and I think that's going to be an ongoing problem for quite some time. If you go to some of the major supermarkets here and check out their cheeses, they're often spoiled, because someone somewhere along the line didn't know how to keep cheeses. I once opened a thing of mozzarella and it was all drippy and it smelled. It was pretty gross.Lense: Another difficulty is that it's very common in an Asian country to have a lot of red tape, mostly with laws were made in the early 1900s and have never been revised. I'm not going to go into details, but sometimes it's absolutely shocking just how backwards the regulations here are. Our company has this issue because we don't pay bribes.
Andre Lense (left) and Kevin Ching. Photo by the author.
Lense: We are absolutely, 100-percent above board, and sometimes that makes it difficult to move things along. A lot of our competitors can just go, "Here's $100. Make it happen."Ching: It's not that other people pay really dirty bribes. They're just doing what everybody does. And it might just be $50 here or $20 there.Maybe this is an odd question, but why not just pay the bribes?
Lense: Our company has high ethics standards and I personally think that's a great thing, because somebody has to make the first step. It feels good to do the right thing sometimes, even if it takes a lot longer to get things done. At the end of the day, I wouldn't do it any other way.Thanks for speaking with me.