The Burmese table: Little Burma feeds itself, then the city

2005 — present

The newest table is a neighborhood: The community itself is the Communities section's; its food record begins in print in July 2005, when the Journal Gazette's account of the growing refugee settlement named the groceries that fed it: Little Burma, selling Oriental groceries and food products on South Lafayette Street at Rudisill Boulevard; the Lucky Burma Gift & Variety Shop at Southgate Plaza; the Asian Market at 2615 South Calhoun Street, partly Burmese-owned — and recorded that a group of Burmese buyers had purchased the Japanese restaurant Yokohama on Coldwater Road. By 2012 National Public Radio was broadcasting from a Fort Wayne neighborhood it named, as the city already did, "Little Burma," and noted a Burmese-owned restaurant, Akaungzarr, opened about a year before. The documented anchor restaurant is Mahnin Asian Restaurant at 2701 South Calhoun Street — the Better Business Bureau's business profile dates its start to 2009 — a Burmese refugee's house serving the table's signature dishes to the city at large: mohinga, the fish-noodle soup that is Burma's national dish; coconut chicken noodle soup; tea-leaf salad; samosas. The travel and food press followed the neighborhood rather than any single room: Oyster's 2016 account of the scene lists the Little Burma grocery's pickled tea leaves and banana plant and Mahnin's Burmese coconut noodle soup, and the restaurant row along South Anthony and Decatur Road — Nawarat, A Kaung Zarr, Mother Home — carried the same documented menu core into the 2020s. In one generation the refugees' groceries became a Fort Wayne food district that outsiders drive in to eat.

Sources:

1. Journal Gazette, "Burmese grow into new, foreign home" (5 July 2005) — the Little Burma grocery, the Lucky Burma Gift & Variety Shop, the Asian Market, the Yokohama purchase.
2. National Public Radio, "Aung San Suu Kyi Makes Midwest Detour On U.S. Visit" (24 September 2012) — the "Little Burma" neighborhood, the Little Burma grocery, Akaungzarr opened about a year earlier.
3. Better Business Bureau business profile, Mahnin Asian Restaurant — the 2009 business start date and the South Calhoun address; restaurant listings of record — the documented mohinga, coconut noodle soup and tea-leaf salad offerings at Mahnin, Nawarat and Mother Home.
4. Oyster.com, "How to Experience Asia Without Leaving the U.S." (2016) — the grocery's pickled tea leaves and Mahnin's Thai-Burmese fare as the scene stood that year.
5. Communities — the Burmese community's own history, cross-referenced and not retold here.