Ah, food, glorious food! One of my favorite activities when traveling is eating. I prefer to sample the local delicacies as much as possible – up to a point. I still can’t stomach the idea of eating fried spiders, fish heads, or rats. I’m not quite than adventurous. Using guidebook advice, information I found online, tips from other travelers, and my own instincts, I visit as many restaurants (and in the case of Myanmar, teashops) and street food vendors as I can cram into a full day – and night.

Overall, I find the food in Myanmar to be quite tasty despite its reputation of offering only oily curries and greasy noodles. Myanmar has a surprisingly diverse selection of food. As you would expect, Burmese and Shan specialties are most common, but there are also many restaurants that serve Indian and Chinese food. Teashops are fantastic places to sample not only tea and snacks (samosas, paratha, cakes, etc.), but also (depending upon the time of day and the shop itself) noodle and rice dishes. And if you get tired of eating Asian food, cities such as Yangon and Mandalay have restaurants that offer various European cuisines.

The most interesting, and sometimes the most delicious, food option is dining at someone’s home. Nothing beats home cooking, and that holds true for Myanmar also. The only thing to watch out for is eating too much. In every home I was invited the hosts served up more food than even I – a notorious glutton – could devour. Even simply stopping by someone’s home for a quick mid-afternoon visit produced an avalanche of snacks and salads, as well as bottomless cups of hot tea.

Some of my favorite things to eat in Myanmar are the salads. There are many varieties of tasty Myanmar salads: tomato salad, peanut salad, ginger salad, tofu salad, and a bizarre concoction called pickled tea leaf salad, which has what Ma Thanegi, the author of An Introduction to Myanmar Cuisine, describes quite accurately as “a strong pesto flavor.”