Hledan Market, Yangon, Myanmar

Hledan Market
Hledan Road
Yangon
Myanmar

by Daw Aung San Mue Sli

Hledan Market. A squat concrete Myanmar-modernism shell of a government building, coloured in peeling light-blue paint and crammed with smallholder stalls, the small and medium enterprises of development practitioners’ dreams. This is the Socialist-era Myanmar, where the Yangon City Development Committee (YCDC) controls market access and items are weighed using antiquated balances and viss weights.

The stalls spill out onto the neighbouring side alleys. Opposite the market, promising good times ahead, there is a Sein Gay Har shopping centre. This caters for the moderately well heeled, with a Moon Bakery on the first floor which sells plastic cakes and plastic pizza and has to be reached by navigating the jumbled racks of the women’s clothing section. This is the new Myanmar circa 2000, pre the banking boom and bust and after eight years of an open economy. 

And on the corner of Hledan junction itself, nestling under the new overpass of one of the worst junctions to try and pass through in a motor vehicle, where you can be stuck at the lights a good half hour, the Hledan Centre, a new shiny mega building that houses the offices of the European Union and is owned by a top crony named inter alia Tun Myint Naing and Steven Law (see Wikileaks for the full list of his names). 

Thus are represented three stages of Myanmar’s promised development. For the best breakfast, I vote the Socialist era. Down one of the side alleys that skirts the market, next to the stall selling sticky rice and sweets and opposite the yoghurt seller with his sweaty pots of yoghurt and slumped plastic bags of unpasteurised milk, two ladies cook and sell fresh sweet bein mohn, ‘wheel snack’, thus named because it is the shape of a wheel. It has a texture halfway between a pancake and a crumpet, is made (I think) with rice flour and a dash of liquid jaggery, is topped with shavings of coconut and peanut, and leaves a slight shine of oil on your fingers. 

The YCDC wants to move all the streetside snack sellers into designated multi-storey market buildings. They are unfairly copping the blame for the sudden (last two years') traffic. An explosion in the number of cars, a lack of viable public transport options, and a city-wide ban on bicycles and motorbikes are probably greater culprits. The proposed move represents a serious threat to breakfast in Hledan.

One of the ladies sliced up my bein mohn with scissors, into a plastic bag, and then I took it into the cool semi-darkness of the market building, and ate the chunks of mohn sitting on a plastic stool at the teastall, with a cup of strong thick sweet ‘po cha’ tea. 

Often when I go out for a teashop or street breakfast, one of my fellow breakfast eaters will pay for my meal. I was seated at this same teastall in Hledan once when a chatty lady explained to me that it was part of the Buddhist way of gaining merit, and I felt momentarily a bit used, but actually what better way of dispensing merit than eating breakfast and being treated to it. 

Paperback

Out in the wild, directly below Red Notice

Initially published in bacon-pattern hardback, The Breakfast Bible is, from today, available in boiled-egg-portraying paperback.

To briefly recap, The Breakfast Bible takes a similarly serious approach to breakfast to The London Review of Breakfasts except, rather than the places that serve the foremost meal, it tackles overall principles and practice. By which I mean, it's a recipe book. Specifically, it's a one-stop source for all of the classic breakfast foods. How best to fry an egg? That's there. Need to make a bagel? With The Breakfast Bible, you will. Desperately seeking a recipe for granola? Cornbread? Channa Masala? Pastéis de nata? You got it.

And there are extras: good pop and rock songs to boil an egg to, breakfast-based astrology, an essay about class at the British breakfast table, and one about a hitherto under-examined dream of Freud's.

It's by me, with many contributions from others, the core cabal being Emily Berry, Richard Godwin, Henry Jeffreys and Peter Meanwell. It's published by Bloomsbury. You can buy it in bookshops. You can buy it online. Perhaps you have bought it already. You can buy it again.

Aqua Shard, Southwark

Aqua Shard
Level 31
The Shard
31 St. Thomas Street
SE1 9RY
020 3011 1256
www.aquashard.co.uk

by Truman Compote

As a long-time follower of the joyously acerbic writing of Ian Martin, his comments on the Shard meant that I arrived for breakfast at the building bearing some prejudice against it: “The architectural press made a great fuss about how sterile and disconnected it is at ground level. My God, have you seen it inside? Seriously. It felt like being in some giant static advert for Everest double glazing.”

It’s become a cliché to take the Shard as a symbol for a lot of what has gone wrong in London in the past decade or so: the loss of social and affordable housing; corrupt or misguided local governance; the replacement of the public sphere by the private.

Indeed, I haven’t even finished locking my bike to the lamppost outside the many revolving doors before I am told by two men in hi-vis jackets that they aren’t at all keen on having me clutter up their pavement (despite my willingness to pay my way inside the building they guard). I politely remonstrate with them, at least asking them (as well as their more senior, suit-clad colleague) to acknowledge the small disgrace of shiny, showy London buildings attempting to claim nearby pavements as private property.

Indoors and onwards, past the brigade of black-clad, clipboard-bearing, bag-X-raying staff, then up, up in the dedicated automatic lift to the 31st floor.

Even the name of the restaurant – Aqua Shard could be a Mayfair spa for the wives of oligarchs – betrays much about the feel of the place. This is a room hermetically sealed (by vertiginous necessity), designed in an anonymously corporate and masculine style. I can imagine it finding particular favour with Formula 1 drivers, rootless tax exiles and the senior executives of FTSE 100 companies – anyone, really, likely to be on nodding terms with the style from their travels in Monaco, Dubai, Hong Kong and the like.

There’s instrumental music lasciviously wafting out of invisible speakers, Balearic lounge stuff, and it’s perhaps just a bit too Playboy Mansion for the breakfast hour.

A waiter arrives with two glass jugs, one containing orange juice, the other pink grapefruit – I choose the latter. I like that it tastes recently squeezed is only slightly, rather than overly, chilled. Good coffee follows.

Between three of us we order the full English, containing a completist two eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, ham hock cannellini beans, hash brown, tomato, black pudding AND sourdough toast; the smoked salmon scrambled egg; and the lobster eggs Benedict. Everything is absolutely present and correct: the bacon has been cooked expertly; all eggs are perfectly poached or fried; and the corn pancake, filled with creme fraiche, which accompanies the smoked salmon dish, has a nourishing, filling heft. Perhaps the English muffin could have been shown the toaster for thirty seconds longer, but that would be nitpicking.

Now, of course, the pricing doesn’t bear even the remotest resemblance to a thoroughgoing English caff, with the full English, for instance, coming in at £17.50. But you don’t ensconce yourself hundreds of feet above the streets and the river two days before Christmas to scan the menu with a cost-saving eye: you are here to have a singular and distinctive treat.

We are sated. The dishes are removed. We ask for the drinks menu, before each choosing a breakfast cocktail. And there we sit, for an hour more, absorbing the play of the waxing and waning patches of sunlight, each half a mile wide, on St Paul’s.