Bagan Burmese Kitchen
🇲🇲 MYANMAR / HISTORICAL: Permanently Closed
🇲🇲 MYANMAR
📍 240 N. Virgil Avenue,
Westlake, Central Los Angeles
EDITOR'S NOTE: Since this article, the business moved to a new location with indoor dining at 240 N. Virgil Avenue, Westlake. That location has closed, although the business is trying to relocate as of late May 2025.
📸 All photos by Jared Cohee
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📆 Original Article 23 January 2022With the exception of Yoma Myanmar, Los Angeles is not blessed with many amazing Burmese restaurants like Daly City and its surrounds in South San Francisco. When something new opens, it of course gets everyone's hopes up as it should, but rarely is the food doing the recipes from back home justice.
A new ghost kitchen on Western Avenue in the far western reaches of East Hollywood has recently opened with the promising name referencing magical Bagan. Its menu is thorough with the usual offerings of salads, curries, and noodle dishes, which are all customarily eaten at room temperature in Myanmar.
Unfortunately the chefs here have decided not to trust Angelenos with the real ingredients that go into Burmese food that make it unique. Almost all the parts are there, but the foods in that country have a very positive funk that comes from a lot of shrimp paste and some other things that just are not in the dishes here.
Even the fermented tea leaves in the tea leaf salad (below) seem to be unfermented. The portion of these to the rest of the dish is not enough anyways, but even if it had ten times more the taste would not change much. It is all so disappointing, but on a hopeful note, maybe they will add these necessary ingredients and get their food up to the level it strives to be.
The most successful dish is the mohinga (below), a fish noodle porridge that is unfortunately only available on weekends at Bagan for now.
Do not leave it out of any Saturday or Sunday order if you are going to give them a shot.
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