Yangon: Tourist Entertainment Guide

The best place to eat familiar food from an international menu is Yangon – the city has a decent enough sprinkling of restaurants serving foreign food- mainly Chinese, Thai or Indian. Small food stalls are the best places to eat good ethnic food with all the spice and seasoning in an atmosphere replete with local flavour. Most of them are places where the bulk of the food is cooked right before your eyes – they’re functional, no-frills places where there may not be a menu or even a place to sit, but the food is wholesome and cheap. One thing to note: the Burmese tend to eat early, so if you’re going out for dinner, aim to reach the restaurant by 8 or 8.30 at the latest: most places shut down by around 9.

Yangon has a few restaurants and bars that offer a measure of nightlife but no karaoke lounges, discotheques and the like. Some hotels do stage cultural performances for their inhouse guests, but even these are few and far between. If you are interested in Myanmarese culture, festivals are the best windows to see and understand the local culture - there’s singing, dancing, music, puppet theatre and theatrical performances, with food stalls et al, and it’s a quite entertaining and educative experience.