The first Burmese restaurant I ever went to, next to Cooper Union, was so-so, and has since shut down. The next one I went to, on Roosevelt Avenue, was better, and has since shut down. There's apparently a Cafe Mingala on the UES, but really, what could be more incongruous than that?

On the other hand, a Burmese food festival, held in a packed school cafeteria in Woodside -- that makes perfect sense. This isn't just about the romance of obscurity, and the hipster/foodie aesthetic of authenticity. It's partly about that. But my real point is that restaurants aren't necessarily the best ways to encounter ethnic food, especially less-celebrated cuisines that struggle to hold onto an audience, and can feel sadly empty at times, or alternately, like they're pandering to less adventurous palates. You're not searching for food alone, but experience, and perhaps a sense of a people that has nothing to do with juntas or hurricanes.

The great thing about the 3rd Annual Moegyo Food Fair, which took place at P.S. 12, was that everything was homemade -- by Burmese, for Burmese. And the Burmese turned out, in droves.

'The Burmese people love food, I think that's the bottom line here,' said June Khin, who moved here from Burma when she was 2 and is part of the humanitarian group Moegyo (pronounced mo-jo). 'And we have great chefs that like to volunteer time. Food definitely draws out the crowd. And Burmese food and Burmese culture -- everything is under-represented in New York.'

Last year's cook-off made about $9,000. This year, they expected to raise a lot more, based on the crowd size; the money, said June, would go to help orphans in Burma. No matter how noble the intentions, however, ultimately the grub's the thing, isn't it?

The first couple of dishes I sampled -- fried chunks of pork, and rice noodles in broth, with minced chicken -- were rather un-remarkable. But I was unphased. In some rooms, the energy is such that you just know good food is nearby. You simply have to wade through some mediocrity.

The standouts, as it turned out, were mere minutes away. They included Shan Noodles -- a thick, tomato-based sauce, with ground chicken, ladled over a bed of white rice noodles, and garnished with peanuts, sesame seeds, green onions and some rather combustive red chili flakes. Even better was the Burmese tofu salad, which had nary a cube of tofu, just slices of vivid yellow cake, made of gram, or ground chickpea, flour.

'This is just like dhokla!' my wife exclaimed, referring to the spongy Gujarati snack, also made of gram flour. We Indians have a reflexively chauvinistic tendency to view all new culinary experiences through the prism of Indian food, especially when it emerges from a neighboring country that, we suspect, has learned everything it knows from India. The 'tofu' in this case, was totally distinct, though. The server, a woman by the name of Grace, told me the dish came from the Burmese state of Shan, which borders China, Laos and Thailand. Its vibrant flavor came from the sauce, a combination of vinegar, soy sauce and chili, along with a sprinkling of lemon leaves, fresh and locally sourced. Outside, in the school parking lot, my daughter and wife and I exchanged our respective styrofoam containers of food, including a surprisingly tasty bowl of shaved ice topped with variously-colored jellos and beans. Next to us, our friends plowed one dish after another into the mouth of their insatiable daughter. She is white and only a year old, but just think: When she is older she will never be able to remember a time when she hadn't tried homemade Burmese food. How could we not live here?