Single and bitter? Make goat curry your Valentine

goat curry, golden triangle, Grace Battista, issue 16, restaurant review, Entertainment - By Grace Battista on Thursday, February 9, 2012 - 03:18

Valentine’s Day is approaching, arm-in-arm with anxiety, disdain and teddy bears wearing cute themed T-shirts. While I think a romantic date at the C.I. could be interesting, couples will inevitably flock to neighboring restaurants to get their V-Day romance fix. In anticipation of the upcoming holiday, my boyfriend and I decided to go to a restaurant in Uptown I had never been to before: Golden Triangle Restaurant.

Upon entering the establishment, which is located on Greenleaf Avenue across the street from Rocky Cola and next to the barbecue place, I was struck by a Burmese tsunami of outdated nylon upholstery and textured walls. The tables, adorned by silk scarves in a pathetic attempt at interior decorating, were plentiful and many were empty. The only other inhabitants of the Golden Triangle Restaurant were a very large and very quiet family and an equally quiet couple eating fervently with chopsticks in the back. Since the restaurant itself was so unappealing, I hoped the food would be delicious. When they are not cute, they usually have a great personality, right?

I have never had Burmese food before, and Golden Triangle Restaurant was a perfect first. I lost my Burmese food V-card to thai iced tea, one of the best things to have ever entered my mouth. It arrived in a tall glass, the layers of cream, tea and caramely syrup forming a beautiful beige sunset. It was sweet and creamy, like iced liquid toffee and a faint tea undertone that kept it from being cloyingly sweet.

We dined on their mixed salad next, a combination of ginger salad and tea leaf salad, called Lap Pad Dok, that the restaurant is known for. This dish caressed my tongue with a gentle, green freshness, tantalized with zippy ginger and finished with satisfying sesame nuttiness. It is hard to even describe it, as the Burmese think of salad in a whole different way than us closed-minded Westerners.

It was a bit like a slaw of fresh ginger, tea leaves, sesame seeds and some other wondrous things dressed in the most divine concoction you have ever tasted. The tacky pseudo-art fell away, I forgot about the awkwardly silent large family and the crumbs covering our sticky pleather booth. The only thing I could see was Lap Pad Dok mixed with ginger salad. It was my reality, my world, my life. I was in love.

After our entrancing salad came a robust plate of fried appetizers. Aptly dubbed the Golden Fried Combination, it contained the restaurant’s namesake: samosas, little flaky phyllo pockets of curried mashed potatoes and peas.

Next to these delicious parcels lounged falafel, spring rolls and fried shrimp, which danced a beautiful pirouette in the trio of dipping sauces, a peanutty satay, vinegary cucumber, and something sweet and spicy. While the innate goodness of fried things can often transform subpar ingredients, Golden Triangle was not trying any trickery.

Their samosa filling was velvety and luxurious with plump peas, the falafel was fresh and clearly homemade with chunks of green onion and the spring rolls were full of traditional Thai glass noodles, chicken and veggies. The fried shrimp was straight forward, sweet and succulent, a familiar face in a strange land. Although this platter was a delicious addition to our meal, it was something one could enjoy at any restaurant of the Asian persuasion, except for the falafel.

Goat Curry with paratha, #69 A, graced our table next. Burmese food is a quirky combo of Thai and Indian, allowing for things like pad thai and goat curry to coexist on the same menu. Paratha is a delicious bready thing hailing from Burma’s Indian side. It is a flatbread made by rolling dough really thin, brushing it with melted butter and rolling it back up, then repeating the process. The result is a buttery, rich, tortilla-like disc of carbohydrate that perfectly scoops up any saucy deliciousness these Burmese may serve.

It has been said that once you go black you never go back. Well, once you go goat, you are off the chicken boat ... or something like that. The goat was as soft as butter, with an assertive, gamey flavor that was much more pleasing than chicken. The curry was not the turmeric yellow concoction stereotypically tied to a dish that can be more complex; it was a rich brown, sparkling with goat fat, studded with tender potatoes and peas.

The richly spiced sauce, vegetables and goat meat formed a succulent ménage à trois in my mouth. Upon placing a droplet of this Burmese nectar upon my tongue, my eyes rolled back in my head in ecstasy.

My throat undulated, taking in every drop of sweet, spicy and savory sauce that blanketed each meltingly tender nugget of goat meat. I moaned.

In between lingering bites of salad and goat curry soaked paratha, which go together perfectly by the way, my date and I decided to get some ice cream. The Golden Triangle makes homemade ice cream in very exotic flavors, including coconut, green tea and vanilla, which I guess might be exotic if you are Burmese.

Durian, a fruit so smelly it is banned on public transportation in some of its native countries, was also a flavor. We decided to try this odiferous specimen in homemade ice cream form, as well as pandan. Pandan is an aromatic leaf used to flavor rice, coconut milk pudding and many other dishes. The pandan ice cream was an off-putting green color, reminiscent of an alien. But all that superficial stuff did not matter after I had laid my tongue on this creamy delicacy.
The ice cream was a brown-sugary coconut river of sweet, icy cream adding to the luscious pile of masticated food now living in my stomach. The pandan imparted a slightly woody, nutty flavor that was utterly comforting and delicious.

Durian ice cream is not for the weak of tongue. A subtle onion flavor tip-toed beneath an overlying note of caramel almond. An essence of garlic and chive cream cheese danced in this sticky, messy mix as well.

Little custardy chunks of the actual fruit were mixed in, little onion-esque bombs. Bizarre, otherworldly, and utterly strange are all fitting descriptions.

However, so are divine, scrumptious and satisfying. Once you have this ice cream, the world will never be the same. I now think in before durian and after durian, that is how magnificently mind-blowing it is.

While the Golden Triangle Restaurant is not aesthetically romantic in any way, its food is pure poetry. It will delight, flirt and seduce you with luscious textures and interesting flavors. While Golden Triangle Restaurant is not cheap, it is not that expensive, especially when their large dishes are shared.

On the scale of romantic restaurants, it stands in the “awkwardly-quiet-and-empty-outdated-place-that-does-not-have-any-ambiance-because-its-food-is-so-good-it-doesn’t-need-it” category.

The food it serves is adventurous and delicious, and eating ice cream that tastes like onions is sure to be a good bonding experience for any couple. I recommend takeout. Instead of getting Italian, why not nibble Lap Pad Dok off each other’s naked bodies?