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| Tuesday, 11-May-2004 00:00 |
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Fried Icecream & Riverside Restaurants Roundup
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The Gallery Restaurant
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Fried Ice cream! (And Tiramisu, which was pretty okay too)
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Another place for fried icecream (left): Som Tam Yok Khrok
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The venue for today's 'review' is The Gallery, a rather up-market restaurant on the river, but I'm going to pretty much pass on absolutely everything the place has to offer and just rant on ONE of their deserts: Fried Ice cream. 
Fried ice cream is ice cream in any kind of batter that's then deep fried real fast, fast enough to keep the ice-cream still in a solid state, but giving it a crispy coating. This is nothing short of food for the Gods. 
The Gallery like I mentioned is perhaps the most up-market of all the restaurants on the river. When crossing the Nawarat bridge across the river at the end of Thapae Road, you first find The Riverside Bar & Restaurant on the left on the river. You basically cannot go wrong there with the food, and it's a popular spot for live music for local Thais as well as foreigners, especially on weekends.
Next to there is The Good View. This one is distinctly more flash & yuppie-ish, as opposed to the more cozy feel at The Riverside. The live music at the Good View varies a bit, but is almost always quite loud. On the plus side, The Good View often has new dishes on the specials-menu making it more interesting if you like trying new things. Also order an Irish Coffee there sometime.. they prepare it at your table and is quite an impressive show. (But then it'd better be, at 160 baht or so.)
Then next to The Good View is The Gallery, which has a handicraft store area in front, and a restaurant area in the back on the river. The Gallery is the most expensive, roughly 50% more than most other riverside restaurants. However, they have fried ice cream on the menu. 
Next to The Gallery is The Brasserie, another riverside restaurant, but this one features decent live music that mostly appeals to a younger foreign crowd. 'Took' is a locally famous guitarist who, when he's up for it and not too stoned, plays excellent rock & blues music, think Santana and Jimi Hendrix and so on, a nice break from standard Thai or Western pop. Get there later in the evening though, say 11pm onwards.
Note that there are far more big & popular restaurants on the river both North as well as South from this strip, but I'll save those for some other time. So back to The Gallery: last night, after having dinner at some other place, we came over here ONLY for an espresso & fried ice cream. Espresso is 40 baht, the fried ice cream 80. Also the setting is just very nice; it's a stylish and tasteful place, perhaps oriented at the somewhat older, more affluent visitor. (Can't believe I said that.. I'm not THAT old.. (Or that affluent, for that matter  )
If you don't want to splurge, but still want fried icecream then you could also settle for the 'Som Tam Yok Khrok' restaurants. These apply a fast-food theme to som tam (green papaya salad), something I find very unnerving.  However they do also have fried ice cream; completely not in the same league as at The Gallery, but at the price (15-20 baht or so) pretty fair. There's a Som Tam Yok Khrok restaurant on Huay Kaew Road on the left side before you get to Chiang Mai University
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| Monday, 10-May-2004 00:00 |
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Kafe Restaurant
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Kafe Restaurant
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Not a very good pic, anyone want to donate a new camera? :)
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Pork chop, grilled spare-ribs and kaeng noh bamboo soup/curry
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Here's a place that looks every bit like an American style bar. However besides cheap beer and Western favorites, it also does Thai food really well, and even regional Northern Thai food! They didn't bother to translate all of those on the menu, but it's definitely there, as well as on their little whiteboard with daily specials. So here's a place where you can have a 30 baht beer (happy hour ends at 7pm), a hamburger and fries, AND a very decent Kaeng Noh Northern Bamboo soup/curry on the side. It even has more exotic Northern stuff on the menu that I don't dare mention here for fear of scaring people off, but DO try the sour grilled spare-ribs. (Naem See Khrong Moo, pictured.)
Kafe is a very long running place and used to get a good mix of local Thais as well as Western tourists, but recently the tourists often have the upper hand, depending on the season.
Most dishes are moderately priced, say 60-80 baht for Thai food and 80-120 baht for Western dishes, though a simple Hamburger and fries can be had for 60. Where you'll really save compared to the bigger pub-restaurants on the river is when you're a beer drinker. They have Chang beer on draft that's just cheap by any standard, and VERY cheap before 7pm.
Kafe is on Moon Muang Road, along the moat North of Thapae. It's in between Soi 5 and Ratwithee Road, exactly opposite the huge Rydges hotel.
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| Tuesday, 4-May-2004 00:00 |
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Pad Thai
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Sawoey Pad Thai Restaurant
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Frying Pad Thai on a large flat surface
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Pad Thai + raw veggies. Note the banana flower in the middle
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Pad Thai could be to Thailand what a hamburger is to America.. Not often a meal all by itself, but a quick and filling light meal, or in between meals. Most places serving Pad Thai are doing a decent job of it; after all, there's not THAT much that can go wrong frying noodles with some tofu, bean sprouts and (dried) shrimp. Many of the 'dedicated' Pad Thai places also serve 'Hoi Thod': fried mussels in batter. This is just a tad too much of a 'carbs & oil' attack for me, so I mostly stick with the Pad Thai.
I’m not overly picky about Pad Thai, but one thing that I really think MUST be included on the side, along with more bean sprouts and some spring onion, is some ‘hua-plee’: the flower of the banana tree.
The place where I took the pictures is called, a tad pretentiously, ‘Sawoey Pad Thai’. It’s on Fa Ham road, the road along the Ping river. When going North on Fa Ham road, it’s some 300 meters before you get to the Superhighway.
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| Thursday, 29-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Khanom Bueang
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Khanom Bueang next to Sanpakhoi Market
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The cookies are folded taco/crepe style
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Cookie anyone?
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Let's do another favorite hawker-food item today: Khanom Bueang. These are taco-shaped 'cookies', or miniature 'crepes' if you like, that have a sweet filling of white cream and other sweet stuff. They're actually pretty difficult to eat without smearing cream all over the place.  The crepe-taco-shell starts out as a dough-paste and is put on a hot plate in a circular shape. This then becomes the very thin and crispy shell for the cookie.
You find vendors selling khanom bueang all over the place, mostly near markets or food centers. This particular one has been in this location for a long time so is a reliable place to get them. The stall is in front of 'Daeng Ocha' noodle shop, which has been there pretty much forever and really looks the part too.  It's on the road/soi that goes from Charoen Muang road towards Sanpakhoi Market and the Kawila barracks; when coming from Nawarat Bridge, that's the traffic light intersection where Krung Thai bank is on the right.
Khanom Bueang cookies go for 2 baht each. Some vendors may do miniature versions of them that are sold at 1 baht each and are a lot less challenging to eat in terms of smearing white cream all over yourself.
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| Wednesday, 28-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Road-side Pizza
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Pizza Food Stall
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Big gas operated oven for baking the pizza's
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Small seafood pizza: 40 baht.
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Update: This place hasn't opened for the last few evenings. The stall is still there, but it's closed. When it opens again or moves to a different location I will make an update.
Thailand is well known for excellent and very abundant street hawker food; small stalls, often no more than a cart with wheels or a moped with sidecar, they provide an amazing variety of food. Most of it is traditional Thai food and snacks, but always in motion, street-cuisine is.. So here and there you may also find other types of food sold hawker-style: sandwiches, Japanese noodles, and as shown here: pizza & steak! And at great prices too!
First a little rant on pizza in Thailand: There are basically two styles: First 'real pizza', as sold in Italian restaurants, sometimes made by actual Italian chefs. There are quite a few Italian restaurants around Chiang Mai, I hesitate to name any one as being the best, but may get around to this sometime. And then there's the other style: pizza of the Pizza Hut variety. This would be most popular with local Thai people. Note that most of the actual Italian restaurants in town are LESS expensive than Pizza Hut by the way! Today’s review of "Lucky Film Pizza & Stake" is firmly in the Pizza Hut category, but don't dismiss it just yet. My main gripe with Pizza Hut (or Pizza Company for that matter) is not even the food they offer; at, say, 40 baht per pizza it would be perfectly acceptable for a quick lunch or snack. Sadly though, they charge like 200 up to a whopping 400 baht for their pizza's.. Bottle of Pepsi priced 50% higher than at the 7-Eleven next door to go with that? Also, ordering 'delivery' of a pizza from a downtown Bangkok business district outlet, all the way up to the 47th floor of your skyscraper multinational office, costs exactly the same as when picking it up yourself from a tiny little Pizza Hut shop-house in the outskirts of Chiang Mai. This, you'll agree, is insane.
But here and now, ladies and gentlemen, the insanity ends! For there is now pizza that's in every way the same as Pizza Hut, available for just 40 baht for a small pizza, 60 baht for a large one. (Or medium one, in Pizza Hut terminology) Pizza's of the same size all cost the same, no matter if you order the seafood pizza (pictured) or any of the other toppings available. And it gets better: A pizza with ham & pineapple is called 'a pizza with ham and pineapple', not "Super Supreme Tropical Hawaii Delight". It even comes with little bags of ketchup, chilly sauce and oregano, just like at Pizza Hut. So get your pizza's here! (Unless of course, you want a proper Italian restaurant dinner, a nice thin-crust pizza with a choice of Italian cheeses, artichokes, anchovies and olives and all)
The pizza stall is on the Hang Dong road, they used to be in front of the Honda Dealer but now moved a bit further down that road, just before you get to the traffic lights of the Middle Ring road. This is DIRECTLY in the path of landing airplanes at CNX International Airport.  So if you're lucky you will get to see the bottom of some really big planes while waiting for your pizza, as they pass overhead about 7 seconds before touchdown.
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| Tuesday, 27-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Kha Moo -- Pork meat & rice..
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Chang Phuak Kha Moo stall
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Order takeaway or eat at the food market tables
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Pork meat over rice.. fast & simple
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Here's a dish I never was very fond of but came to appreciate recently: Kha Moo, literally 'pork leg'. The meat is stewed with Chinese spices, then served over rice with some sour vegetables (shades of a German pork knuckle & sauerkraut come to mind), sometimes with a boiled egg and some sour-spicy sauce on the side.
This dish is mostly sold by small food stalls and you can find it all over the country. In Chiang Mai I think this particular food stall, located at the Chang Phuak evening food market is a very good bet. It's been very long running, and rather popular, so other stalls selling the same dish have sprung up around it. At the Chang Phuak food market there are at least 2 others selling only this dish!
Another reason why I started visiting Kha Moo shops more often is... my dog. Popular pork leg shops are invariably left with a huge pile of pork bones to discard.. and you guessed it, a couple of those, that I you can get for free, make my dog a very happy camper indeed.
Chang Phuak food market operates only in the evening, just North of Chang Phuak gate, the Northern city gate in Chiang Mai. Food is mostly very inexpensive, this Kha Moo dish goes for 20 baht standard, or 25 baht with egg. Or you can order a bigger serving of the pork meat, without rice, for 30 baht.
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| Monday, 26-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Siam Celadon Tea House / Old Architecture
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Siam Celadon Tea House
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Very stylish architecture. Note the open middle section
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Club sandwich and iced honey green tea
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We have to admit it, Thailand can be a bit of a cultural Sahara when it comes to architecture, not including temple architecture of course. Over the centuries most common homes have mostly been constructed of wood, which means the really old ones mostly aren't around anymore, or were knocked down to make space for the typical concrete shoebox design that's not all that pleasing to the eye.
If you look long and hard though then you can find some nice older buildings in Chiang Mai and other Thai cities. Many you won't notice at first glance because they may be run down a bit or have a huge billboard in front.. But recently many of the old houses are being restored and turned into boutique restaurants or shops. Or both, in case of Siam Celadon Tea House.
The front room of this very nicely renovated house is a shop selling celadon ceramics, the back side is a tea house that now also sells some food items such as cakes, salads and sandwiches. There's a small but nice garden in the back, too. Obviously a lot of money and effort has been spent here, giving the place a truly 5 star look, and that in an actual old authentic building too. I've never seen it very busy with customers though, and preparing the club sandwich I ordered did take a looonngg time; this with only two customers there, one of them being myself.
But then again this is not a place where you should go when in a hurry.. It really reminds you of a more leisurely time, you can sit around the garden area, have a cup of tea while reading the newspaper or soaking up the atmosphere.. it's that kind of place.
The food or drinks aren't even the main attraction I'd say, I ordered an iced green tea & honey drink and a club sandwich. Sandwiches go for 45-65 baht or so, hot and cold drinks, mostly teas, for 30-45. I spent exactly 100 baht on the sandwich and drink. So moderate prices, but given the 5 star surroundings I'd perhaps rate it as a pretty awesome bargain.. when you're not in a hurry.
Siam Celadon Tea House is on Thapae Road, one of the busiest in town, just before you get to the Mae Kha Canal and that weird road towards the Big Market where traffic is on the right hand side.. When walking from Thapae Gate towards the river, it would of course be on the left and side, just after the canal.
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| Friday, 23-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Eat Me!
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What's in a name.. Eat Me! Restaurant
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Small aircon area gets crowded for lunch
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Nice Caesar Salad, iced green tea shake and Thai noodle dish
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Back from the Songkran party & holiday, picking up where I left off.. It's still very much the hot season in Chiang Mai, so good idea to do another airconditioned place today. Called Eat Me!
Eat Me is a bright, young and cute place that combines cake & bakery with regular Thai and some Western food. It has an inside airconditioned area as well as some tables outside. As this is the hot season, most people opted to go inside.. Prices are still quite low, higher than food-stall or small shop level but still well below 'big restaurant' prices. Figure 30-60 baht for most dishes. Attempted Western food even, the Ceasar Salad which actually was far better than I expected. This keeping in mind that my expectations for Western food in pretty much Thai-only cheaper locations aren't necessarily that high, but a good serving of a nice crisp lettuce, bacon flakes, croutons and actual grated parmesan cheese and right amount of ceasar dressing is well better than par for this course. Actually finding any cheese at all in Thai restaurants that's not the pasty Kraft plastic-wrapped stuff is already worth mentioning. (Hell, finding a salad dressing that's not a sweetish yellow cream is worth mentioning! )
Eat Me! is on Nimmanhaemin Road, a road that really came alive the past 2-3 years with lots of pubs and interesting little restaurants that mostly seem to be run by younger enthusiastic operators. Eat Me! is on the left side when going towards Suthep Road, before you get to the traffic lights of the road that branches off to Chiang Mai University.
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| Sunday, 11-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Southern Thai Food / Lung Jit
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Lung Jit Restaurant
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Just order by pointing at stuff
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Proper Southern fare, with LOTS of raw vegetables for cooling..
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Probably one of the best restaurants serving Southern Thai food is Phuket Laikhram, see this review. It's however a bit more of the Chinese style southern food like you'd actually find in Phuket town, and not the hard-core seriously spicy curry stuff. I think that type of food deserves mention of its own. I'm not entirely sure this place here is one of the best in Chiang Mai, but it is authentic, has good variety and is definitely very very spicy, as in: spicy by Thai food standards..
I've tried a few Southern Thai places the past few weeks, and they all seem to have one thing in common: operators try to warn a Western looking visitor about the spicy food, suggest non spicy dishes or even try to discourage him ordering some of the spicier stuff! 0) So bring some level of determination if you want to sample the spiciest of foods..
I'm still looking for 'The Ultimate Southern Thai' food in Chiang Mai, do comment if you know of a place, but for now this one will do. It's called 'Lung Jit' and is on Arak Road, this is the road along the city moat, on the inside, 100-200 meters after passing Hua Rin Corner and just before you get to the first U-turn that would lead you to Ram Hospital.
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| Saturday, 10-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Wichianburi Grilled Chicken
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Kai Yaang Wichianburi
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Grilling full size chickens
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Nice with som tam green papaya salad
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Yesss..! I found the Wichianburi Grilled Chicken place back.  Wichianburi is a district in Phetchaboon province that is apparently quite famous for its grilled chicken. See this site in Thai. The only location for Wichianburi grilled chicken used to be a shop located on Sirimangalajarn Road (the road you take to reach the back entrance to Central Kad Suan Kaew Mall) that shop dissappeared for a while but has now re-opened just 30 meters from its old location, into a little soi next to the Green <something> Hotel.
Anyway, Wichianburi grilled chicken is the right stuff! Feel free to comment if you know of other locations, but places that grill chicken pretty much 'wholesale' aren't as common in Chiang Mai as you might expect. I think it's more of a North Eastern thing to find the combination of Som Tam and serious numbers of grilled chicken.
The place does look like it was set up in a hurry though, it's not really a proper restaurant (yet), but honestly, looking at the quality of the chicken and the popularity today, one would hope and expect that they can grow their business here. Inevitably when there's a restaurant that has an actual roof and all, prices will go up a little. Looking at the blue sheet they use for a roof right now I wonder what would happen in the rainy season..
As it is, prices are low, low low. It's not that often that I suspect they charged me too little by mistake, but today it happened: A decent serving of som tam green papaya salad, half of a good sized grilled chicken, bottled water & ice came to the grand total of 50 baht. Assuming Som tam was 15-20 baht and water and ice 5 baht, that would mean 50 or 60 baht for a whole grilled chicken?! Wow.
There are drawbacks as well of course.. A less sandy location a tiny bit away from traffic would be nice.. And again, we'll see what happens in the rainy season. For now though, get yer fresh grilled chickens here. It's on Rakang road, at least I think this stretch of road is still called that. Easiest to get there: When driving on Chang Klan road (night bazar road) going south, then keep going south at the intersection with Sri Donchai Rd (Old Saeng Tawan cinema). Then at the next traffic lights turn right and you will find this place on the left side of the road.
(Hey, I finished this entire entry without taking a jab at KFC... but seriously, you've GOT to be nuts to go eat fried chicken there when grilled chicken is so much tastier and cheaper..
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