Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

I went to Amay's House years ago and remembered it to be rather good, including a really decent roti prata with chicken curry that was just as I remembered eating them long ago in Singapore when I was still a child. They since closed and recently reopened near Joyce Skytrain Station -- basically at the busy intersection of Kingsway and Joyce, next door to the CIBC. Currently it looks terrible with the busted front door, but inside it's clean and decently maintained. Appetizers have appetizer portions and appetizer prices, but noodle mains had generous portions for price, which is not that easy to find nowadays. Great value! Burmese Style Samosas ($10 - samosas stuffed with diced potatoes, onions, traditional spices) Inside it looks like curried potatoes but the flavour is quite weak, though the subtle red onion does make itself known to impart some interestingness to the potatoes. The description doesn't say it's curried potato so they can't be faulted for not hav...

Back to Amay's House after a very long time ( 2015! ) and good to see this little place is still around and offering good value even with the expected price increases over time. Roti Prata ($3) one piece side order Crispy on the outside, very moist and tender on the inside, and oily to achieve this result but that's expected. Overall texture and taste is good, dough is pretty thin, and easy to hand-tear. This came flat from the pan and not hand-crushed into a tender mass, which is an alternate way it is served. As a side order it does NOT come with anything for dipping. Prata Served with Curry Chicken ($5.50 for 1 piece, $8.50 for 2 pieces) Prata on the side. I had this to go and they crushed the prata, possibly to prevent the crust from cooling and hardening into a chewy slab. This way it was still fairly easy to hand-tear for dipping into the curry. It's chicken curry, not curried chicken pieces. So you do get chunks of chicken meat as well as some c...

Everything on the menu is under $10! Just one main at Amay's House can see you pretty full. It's a mom-and-pop restaurant in a clean restaurant in a somewhat dingy looking older neighborhood. Not posh, but good dine-outs can lurk anywhere, so be careful about judging a place solely by the decor. I have no idea what Burmese food is supposed to be like, so this won't be a post about what's authentic, only what's tasty. And although Burmese food is the draw here, there are other items that look familiar from elsewhere in South East Asia, such as laksa and mee goreng . Also, "curry" is a tricky word with as many variants as cultures that have their own variants, so any comparison of Burmese curry to any other curry you may have had is a fallacious one. You can say "I prefer Indian curry", but that's really comparing apples to oranges. The various curries we tried (Beef Lemon Grass, Mutton, and Lamb) were more like stews and there was basi...