Two Fish Myanmar opens its doors in Clarkston – offering homestyle Burmese dishes to Metro Atlanta residents

In a gleaming new kitchen just east of the Clarkston railroad tracks, Yapar Shel puts together a salad while his daughter Victoria, stationed at a counter out in the dining room, handles dessert. 

She’s making lightly sweet, brightly colored shwe yin aye: green ribbons of pandan jelly layered on chewy, bright-red pearls, all doused in coconut milk atop a bed of sticky rice. Like the tea leaf salad her father is assembling, it’s a staple of the cuisine of Myanmar. Together and separately, the dishes span a stupendous range of flavors and textures: In addition to fermented tea leaves, the salad contains crunchy cabbage and roasted peanuts, fried yellow split peas and fried garlic; peppers give it a generous spice, dried shrimp bring an umami punch, and a squeeze of lime brightens the whole thing. It seems to engage every single taste bud.

The dishes are just a couple highlights at Two Fish Myanmar Cuisine, which opened in April in the new Clarkston Market complex. Centered around a big communal lawn, the development marks an enlargement of Clarkston’s business district—giving residents in (and visitors to) the metro’s famous immigrant and refugee hub a reason to wander across the tracks from the popular Refuge Coffee, and expanding the already voluminous local options for international cuisine. Other businesses in the development include the Ethiopian restaurant Chef Winnie’s Kitchen, the Middle Eastern cafe Al Chef, and Kuku Ethiopian Coffee.

For Yapar Shel and his wife, Roi San, sweets are what started it all: shwe yin aye, falooda, and another cool, coconut-spiked preparation called mont let saung. Originally from Myanmar, Yapar and Roi met in Malaysia before resettling in the U.S. in 2015. They started selling desserts out of their Clarkston home during the first year of the pandemic, advertising only on Facebook and through word of mouth. “I remember at the time making 10 cups” of mont let saung, Yapar says, and becoming excited when they sold out.

Refugees from Myanmar, which has suffered under a succession of repressive governments since gaining independence from Britain in 1948, have been among the top three resettled groups in Georgia for over a decade. The Atlanta area alone is home to thousands of residents originally from Burma. (In 1989, the government changed the country’s official name from Burma to Myanmar, though both remain in use.)  

As the community continued to grow, so did the popularity of Yapar and Roi’s business. They got requests for more savory dishes and their home became a destination for Burmese customers, who otherwise don’t have many nearby sources for the foods they grew up eating.

Soon Yapar and Roi were running their restaurant out of their house two days a week—Wednesday and Saturday—and gaining fans beyond Clarkston; Two Fish Myanmar became the subject of media attention, including a 2021 Atlanta Journal-Constitution profile. A couple months after the AJC piece ran, Yapar and Roi took a break to focus on raising their two daughters—while thinking about opening an actual brick-and-mortar restaurant. They did a little catering: Local churches would call and ask them to cook for a crowd. Yapar kept his job as a delivery driver until Roi persuaded him it was time to move on. “My wife told me, Why don’t you stop it?” he says. “And we go next chapter, next challenge. Let’s try it.” 

Now, working full-time at Two Fish Myanmar, he has a job that doesn’t take him away from his family. “The good thing is, all the time, we’re together.”

The name of the business comes from the Bible—the passage about how Jesus took five loaves and two fishes and multiplied them to feed a crowd. “I want to feed people, like Jesus,” Yapar says. “Jesus don’t take a charge, you know. But I charge a little bit.” Really, though, just a little—Yapar says that it’s important to him that his restaurant stays affordable, and prices are remarkably low: $7.50, for instance, for a bowl of mohinga, the “unofficial national dish” of Myanmar—rice noodle and fish soup, fragrant with ginger, garlic, and lemongrass—that Yapar recommends for newcomers.

Also on the menu: beef salad and mango salad, Shan noodles with chicken gravy and pickled mustard leaves, and dishes like kyay oo sigyet—rice vermicelli with pork, meatballs, intestine, tofu, quail egg, garlic, and the leafy vegetable choy sum.

As the dinner hour approaches, Roi San shows up with the family’s younger child, who’s soon doing cartwheels on the turf outside the restaurant’s front door. “This is a family business: me, my wife, and my daughter,” Yapar says. “What we can do, we do.”