"This is one of the main babies we got in here, our child."
That is how Alex Regules introduces the mohinga at Laksa. He co-owns the stall, along with Lin's Poke & Sushi a few steps away, and this is the bowl he leads with.
Mohinga is the national dish of Myanmar: a fish broth poured over rice vermicelli, sold off street carts and out of teashops before most of the country is properly awake.
In Myanmar it is usually built on river fish. Chef Lin, who runs the Laksa kitchen, cooks it here with salmon.
"It's a breakfast item, but we eat this all day long," he says.
That is how it works here too. The bowl comes out of the kitchen at two in the afternoon the same way it would at seven in the morning, and nobody in the market blinks at it.
It arrives loaded. Fried vegetable tempura leans on the rim with a wedge of lime beside it. Underneath is a deep red broth over rice vermicelli, a half boiled egg, soft slabs of tofu, and a tangle of sliced scallion, slivered onion, and cilantro laid across the top to cut the richness. You squeeze the lime, stir everything down, and the bowl changes as you go.
"So every bite is unique, every bite is special," he says.
The cooking comes from home, by way of a long detour. "My wife is Burmese," Alex says. "My wife spent 10 years in Malaysia, and she's a food lover by heart. That will describe her personality, a food lover, a decade."
That decade is why the menu reads the way it does, Burmese and Malaysian sharing one counter, mohinga a few lines down from the laksa the stall is named for.
Mohinga was not on that menu at the start. Laksa opened three years ago around what Chef Lin found when she got here. "When we started, we saw lots of seafood in New Orleans, especially shrimp," she says. "The shrimp and laksa ingredients are the best I've ever had." Customers kept asking for mohinga, so she started cooking it.
The same thinking explains the two coconut soups on the board, which are not the same dish. One is the Malaysian style, made with shrimp. The other is Burmese, and she will build it with whatever protein you want, including a version for vegan diners. Both were originally eaten with egg noodles.
She cooks around what people need. Vegan, pescatarian, no seafood, gluten free, no soy sauce in the bowl: ask, and it gets adjusted.
"Let us show you how we cook, how we eat our food, our traditions," he says. "Glad to share that with you."
You'll find Laksa inside St. Roch Market at 2381 St. Claude Ave, alongside the tea leaf salad, the coconut curries, and the rest of the noodle soups.