More than 4% of Buffalo’s population are people born in Burma. Despite federal programs resettling refugees from that country in Erie County for decades, the scale of the city’s most recent wave of immigration tends to surprise people.
The plethora of Burmese restaurants should be a clue. Plentiful enough to be their own genre in Buffalo-area dining opportunities, most offer Burmese and Thai dishes, plus one Japanese effort, sushi.
Why is Burmese-Thai-sushi a thing? Because most of their menus can also be read as a restaurant origin story.
Burmese flavors they grew up on, in the land of their birth. Thai cuisine learned while working in Thailand as refugees, waiting for entry to the United States. Sushi because many Burmese cooks’ first American job was rolling sushi, thanks to a Burmese-run company providing workers to supermarket sushi counters.
