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Burmese cuisine appears to be one of the black holes of South East Asian cuisine. Madhur Jaffrey in her otherwise excellent guide Far Eastern Cooking (BBC Books 1989) does not mention it at all.

Unfortunately it has, in India at least, become synonymous with that highly popular though overrated dish “Kausway”, a kind of diy kit for noodles much loved by bored suburban housewives in search of exotica.Busaba, in Colaba purports to do an authentic version, but there are grave doubts as to the authenticity.It is the Burmese equivalent of the infamous chicken tikka masala.

My interest in Burmese cuisine arises from a recent meal at what has been described as the finest Burmese restaurant in the world, Bomra in Goa.There really is no point of comparison at least in my gastronomic lexicon. But first I think it useful to explain how Burmese cuisine differs from other South-East Asian cuisines.

Needless to say Burmese food is strongly influenced by Indian, Chinese, Malay and Thai. The junta which rules the country with an iron hand does not believe in development and as a result the cuisine remains localised.

That is not necessarily a bad thing, as it means that you have a diversity of dishes and not too much standardisation.In fact the country’s original name translated from Burmese is “1000 Countries united under a Royal Burma”.

Dishes will vary from the coastal to the highlands and there will be many interpretations of the classics. For example, the iconic Burmese dish of sour cooked pork is a combination of pork and extremely sour mangoes. But you can use chicken, beef and so on and the souring agents can range from canned Indian lime to mango pickle.This dish typifies a cuisine which traverses a variety of flavours, salty, sour, bitter — anything but bland.

This is typified in the unofficial national dish of Mohinga, which consists of rice vermicelli in a fish broth, with onions, garlic, ginger, lemon grass, sliced tender core banana stem served with boiled eggs, fried fish cakes and fritters. Wow!

Every cuisine has a philosophy.Given the desire to titillate with complex flavours, the underlying philosophy is to focus on each mouthful; this is in line with the Buddhist culture of contemplation and meditation.In fact in an excellent essay on Burmese food, there is the suggestion that the counterpoint to the slow cooking movement in Europe is the slow eating movement in Burma, meditate while you eat.

To return to Bomra, it is a most unprepossessing restaurant off Calangute, with a relaxed garden air and plastic chairs. The chef-cum-owner Bawmra Jap lives in London and spends five months in Goa running this restaurant. When I visited with friends last weekend I was happy to see the most famous of Bomra’s clients, the great Amitav Ghosh, relaxing in a corner.

I noted that some of the traditional dishes, the red snapper with lemon grass have been slightly overshadowed by new creations, the pomfret with black miso cannot, in any view, be Burmese, but it was delicious nonetheless.The tea leaf salad was outstanding, there was a vegetarian and a non-veg version, and it consisted of pickled tea leaves, fried peas, peanuts, garlic, roasted sesame, fresh garlic, dried shrimps and preserved ginger.

The dressing was peanut oil, fish sauce and lime.The taste was complex and really did invite meditation over every mouthful.Truly, Zen food.