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| Friday, 9-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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3 Baht Noodle (Kuaytiow 3 Baht)
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Restaurant is at the end of this little soi. Note the signs.
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When she was young, ALL kuaytiow was 3 baht!
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3 Baht noodle + 10 baht Khao Soi + free ice water
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If you've read some of my reviews of Thai food before on this page then you may have noticed that I have a weak spot for inexpensive places. Indeed in Thailand there often seems to be no relation between the quality & tastiness of the food and the price. Price relates more directly with 'ambience' than with the actual food served; like a restaurant that is in a prime riverside location, features live music, air-conditioning, plenty of waitresses, a large menu, table cloths and so on will be priced higher than a small road-side food stall or mom & pop restaurant with plastic plates and forks and spoons so thin they bend out of shape by merely looking at them. Really, anyone can be a Uri Geller at these places! Kidding aside, the actual food at these cheaper places may very well be as good or even better than at the posh pub-restaurants.
No such claims about 'the best' for this place today, but MAN is it cheap! "Kuaytiow Saam Baht" (Three Baht Noodle) restaurant does exactly what the name suggests: Sell noodle soup at prices from Grandmother's era. Admitted, the portions are seriously small, but then again sometimes you don't want to eat all that much food, and it's excellent when you're on a diet. Or you can add some variety and add more servings or dishes, as they also do Khao Soi (Yellow noodles in a curry soup). What a difference the size of this Khao Soi bowl is with the shop that I think does the best in Chiang Mai, see: Khao Soi Techno College (Mae Jam Paa)).
Anyway, when you're paying a grand total of 13 baht for lunch, then who's complaining. This shop, 'Kuaytiow Saam Baht' is on Doi Saket Kao road, that's the road that runs North of, and more or less parallel to Kaew Nawarat road. If you come from Rattanakosin Bridge then you will find the shop on your left hand side. Or when coming from near the Arcade Bus terminal and doing a right-left at the first traffic lights on to Doi Saket Kao road then it's on the right side of course.
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| Thursday, 8-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Ancient Ice Coffee
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Old style coffee shop
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Note the cotton filters that are used for making strong coffee
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Poor strong coffee in a bag with ice, add sweet condensed milk
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I was planning on showing Southern Thai food today, but still no luck finding a place that's really exceptional in that area in Chiang Mai.. Stay tuned for that one. So instead let me opt for the best Ice Coffee in Chiang Mai. 
Most of the time when you order coffee in Thailand you will be served Nescafe instant coffee, with some Coffeemate creamer. This is changing now with more and more 'real' coffee & cake boutique shops opening up. But Thailand has always had places selling real coffee, often very strong and sweet. This is called 'Kafae Thung' (coffee from a bag) or 'Kafae Boran' ('ancient' coffee, or old style coffee). The bag here is a cotton re-usable filter that's used to make filtered coffee.
It's less sophisticated than the new air-conditioned Starbucks copy-cat shops, but definitely worth trying, and also quite inexpensive at 5-10 baht for a cup or glass of hot or iced coffee. Thais do like it sweet though!! 
Old style filter coffee can be found in many places, often near markets or food markets. This place is located outside a curry & rice restaurant on Charoen Muang road, on the right side before you get to the railway station. It's just after a Shell Gas station. You can order take-away in a bag with ice and a straw..
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| Wednesday, 7-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Kaen Chai Isarn food & the Quest for the best Som Tam
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Kaen Chai North Eastern Thai food
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Basic but functional semi-outdoors interior
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This place does one of the best Som Tam in Chiang Mai
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Here's one of the best places for Isarn (North Eastern Thai) Food, including a very good Som Tam green papaya salad, perhaps the most famous and also most common of Isarn food. Som Tam is a traditional North Eastern (and Northern) spicy salad made with green papaya. It can be more or less on the sour side, sweet-sour side or salty side, but almost always seriously spicy. Thais, especially those from the North East, can be very picky about their som tam. Many people from the North Eastern (Isarn) region of the country complain about the som tam in Chiang Mai.. they have a seriously hard time finding a vendor that can make it the way they prefer. A very reliable way of spoiling a North Easterner's day would be to feed him/her bland sweetish baby-som tam.. stirred, not pounded..  Som tam can be completely fine-tuned according to taste, even the average Westerner's taste, however it takes considerable skill to be able to prepare just right according to the customer's particular preference.
Kaen Chai here is definitely in contention for the title of best som tam.. But the place does far more than just som tam, it has a large variety of North Eastern dishes, including many curries and 'larb isarn' of course. And it has some, erm, more interesting things on the menu. Isarn food is always a good bet for the culinary adventurous, and Kaen Chai did not disappoint me today.
In fact it was a bit embarrassing even. The guy at the restaurant excitedly told me that today they had 'nom moo' on the menu. Pig milk? I wondered.. So.. how is this used/prepared then? Even after he explained it I couldn't quite picture it, but then again, at 30 baht, and aspiring to be culinary adventurous, and for the benefit of the kind readership on this page here I said "oh well, if one doesn't try it, one never knows." And consequently I fell into the nom/nom milk/breast trap, hook, line and sinker. As you may know, 'nom' in Thai means both milk as well as breast (of a woman or other female mammal). Nom moo in this case turned out to be pig udder! Cool.  10 years in Thailand and I STILL managed to fall into one of the oldest cases of Thai-English language confusion there is!  Needless to say it tasted perfectly nice. I doubt people would have guessed what it was unless I told them.
Anyway, I can recommend this place for nice North Eastern food. Most dishes are priced between 30 and 60 baht. Kaen Chai is located opposite of the Siam TV / Electronic plaza building on Singharaj Road. To get there you could for example drive along the moat on Sri Phoom road going West, passing Chang Phuak gate and then Singharaj Road is the first proper road on the left. Turn into it, and just 100m further you find Siam TV on the right and this restaurant on the left.
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| Tuesday, 6-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Roti
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Start out with a small ball of dough and spread it out
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Flip it around pizza bakers style
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Straight on to a hot plate for frying
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Here's one of the all time street-food favorites: Roti 'pancakes'. It's one of those things you will ONLY find on the street, and never in any 'proper' restaurants.
Roti pancakes in one form or another are found all over South and South East Asia. I'm not sure where they originate, but it could very well be an Indian thing. (comments/suggestions welcome on this one). While roti in many countries are a savory bread/pancake eaten with spicy curries, the roti you find on street food stalls in Thailand are pretty much always the sweet variety: pancakes with sweet condensed milk-syrup, sometimes with egg and/or banana added. They're not really pancakes, the dough is formed into a very thin round shape, pretty much like Italian pizza. The dough is then fried on a hot plate until it's done and nice and a bit crispy. I've tried to capture this on 'film', using only my phone-camera so the picture quality is just a wee bit short of National Geographic standards.. : It does show the process though.
Plain roti's are typically sold for 5 baht, and up to 10 or 15 baht when adding egg and banana. Believe it or not, but I didn't eat roti for quite some time because I considered 5 baht to be overpriced... 0) Yes, really. This because I used to spend some time in Sukhothai, and there at the bridge over the Yom river was a truly excellent roti stall, run by a very nice lady who sold plain roti with sweet condensed milk for just 2 baht.. Then when going to Chiang Mai I found them at 5 or even an extortionate 7 baht and consequently considered this was WAY overpriced.. Fortunately for me I'm over this now. Anyway, while in Sukhothai I became one of this Roti lady's best customers, and she even let me try to make roti myself at her stall, flipping the dough around to spread it out and create a thin pancake. Almost needless to say, I sucked at it. People, making roti is seriously difficult! Better to invest the 5 baht I'd say. 
Location: Roti sellers are mostly of the nomadic kind, so I can't really give one fixed location to find this one, or even any one roti seller in the city area. So you will have to locate one yourself.
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| Monday, 5-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Pop Am Restaurant
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Pop-Am Restaurant
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Airconditioned interior.. popular for lunch and dinner
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Khao Ob Saparot, baked rice w. yellow curry powder and pineapple
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With the hot season now seriously making itself felt, airconditioned restaurants make more sense these months than ever. A long running and cheap & cheerful place is Pop-Am restaurant. It's like a restaurant cum ice cream parlor, however the food menu is very extensive and the food is excellent and inexpensive. Almost any dish on the menu is between 40 and 60 baht, the simpler 'over rice' or fried noodle dishes cheaper at around 30 baht.
Service is pretty fast too, and did I mention the place is air-conditioned? One of the dishes I like here (because I don't see it often elsewhere) is Khao Ob Mor Din: Rice baked in a clay pot with ham, mushrooms, raisins and so on. Also nice: Khao Ob Sapparot: Baked rice with yellow curry powder, pineapple, ham, raisins, peas, etc. These are simple dishes of course, but also 'proper' Thai cuisine they do very well, including Tom Yam with very big prawns and dishes that feature a whole fish. There is some Western (or Western-esque) food on the menu as well, like breakfast, hamburger and french fries. There's an ice cream and fruit shake / milk shake menu as well, but I think the ice-cream options are not quite on the same level as the food. A large part of that is that they use the margarine-like paste that so often passes for whipped cream in these regions..  I guess I'm nitpicking, especially at these prices.
Pop-Am restaurant is on Prapokklao Road, inside the old-city area close to Chang Phuak gate opposite the Shell gas station.
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| Sunday, 4-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Food Centers
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Carrefour Food Center
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Lots of small outlets to order from
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A lot of it is made fresh while you wait
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There are quite a few food centers in Chiang Mai, mostly at shopping malls or hypermarkets. The food on offer is pretty much exactly the kinds that you would find at road-side food stalls. However food centers bring lots of these together under one roof, and provide a clean and airconditioned environment. Especially in the hot season, food centers (an shopping malls in general) become very popular places to escape the afternoon heat. Prices are very similar to street food, perhaps priced just 5 baht or so higher per dish. (They get you on the water & drinks )
Do I like food centers? Well............ not really. But that could be because I don't like shopping and shopping malls in general. For sure they're a quick, cool, cheap and convenient place to grab lunch. But they're also busy and noisy, as food centers seem mostly located near areas that produce an incredible noise level, most notably kids playground areas, or worse, video games. As for taste, I think for the most part, 'real' restaurant and long established roadside food stalls have the edge. Some of of the operators of established restaurants or food stalls would actually open a 'branch' and rent an outlet at a food center complex. This is especially the case at the Airport Plaza food center near the Major Cineplex mall. I think the original places are usually better, though.
Still food centers are good because of the variety on offer. They're also easy because you can order from pictures or just by pointing at dishes. Most food centers use some kind of coupon system, where you buy an amount of coupons, say 50 baht's worth, and then pay using these coupons. Any left-over coupons can be exchanged back for real money afterwards. This system lets the food center operators keep track of business for each individual outlet, and it also reduces the opportunities for theft by employees.
Now then.. the best food center in Chiang Mai. For a long time I considered this to be the one at Airport Plaza. However most outlets are definitely a bit more expensive, and generally I think many of them should try harder and improve quantity & quality. So my vote goes to the food center at Carrefour, the big French owned hypermarket chain. Carrefour was renovated and extended last year, and the food center area is now huge. There are many outlets, good variety, low prices between 15-25 baht for most dishes, and always enough space to find a table. They moved from a coupon system to a bar-code card system, pretty much like the BTS Skytrain, where you get a bar-coded card that you can fill or re-fill with any amount of money. Then when paying you just hand over your card, they swipe it through a machine and you get your receipt. When the amount on the card is all used up they keep the card.
Residents of Chiang Mai will of course have no trouble locating Carrefour, for visitors, it's on the Superhighway ring road between the Doi Saket road intersection and the Sankamphaeng road intersection.
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| Saturday, 3-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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The Amazing Sandwich
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The Amazing Sandwich
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There's a small restaurant area, or order takeaway
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Made to order very well-stuffed Baguette at 80 baht
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"A shady island in a sea of rice" is this little shop/restaurant's slogan. Aside from the sandwiches being amazing (especially by Chiang Mai standards), I'm also amazed the place has been such as success over the years, obviously aiming mostly for the foreign market but not being in a very touristed location. I think this is also the first place I review with its own website at http://www.amazingsandwich.com/ though my pictures here look better if I may say so myself.
Aside from sandwiches and subs they also do breakfasts and general Western snacks and pies. When ordering sandwiches you order from a pre-printed order form piece of paper where you tick off the type of bread, choose one or two kinds from several meats, one or two kinds from several kinds of cheese, and add veggies, herbs and sauces.
They're not stingy with the portions either. The baguette I ordered at 80 baht was actually a bit too much for lunch.. Chiang Mai doesn't have a Subway yet, but I'm willing to bet this place has the edge in taste, price and value!
The Amazing Sandwich is located on Phrapokklao Road, a couple of steps North of the Thai Airways office. If you had the dubious idea of trying to go to Thai airways at lunchtime when all their staff are also having lunch, you can get the queue-number at the Thai Air office and then go eat at Amazing Sandwich and come back with time to spare!
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| Friday, 2-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Yatai Japanese Ramen Stall
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Yatai Ramen shop
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Street-side sushi bar area with wooden tables set up
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Colorful.. ;-)
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There must be hundreds of thousands of noodle stalls in Thailand. Here's one with a twist: it's a regular mostly open-air road-side food stall, however serves Japanese noodles, sushi and rice dishes. The setting is just like a Thai noodles food stall: tables and chairs on the pavement. You can order the noodles by filling in a pre-printed list of dishes, where you just specify how many of each you want to order. There's also a picture menu available for the sushi/sashimi dishes.
Prices are low for the noodle dishes, most go for like 35 baht which is just a tad higher than a Thai 'kuaytiow' noodle stall would charge. The sushi is priced higher, at 55 baht for the ones with more basic ingredients, up to 90 or even 115 for dishes with more expensive fish. (You do get many pieces though..) Individual pieces like the orange shrimp-egg sushi are priced at 15 baht each.
The sushi dishes are definitely getting better all the time. The mixed Sashimi set was excellent, but I thought the seaweed wrappers for some of the wrapped sushi could be more crisp than they were. The noodle dishes remain a very good deal as well.
The place has recently expanded, and also moved from its old location near the intersection with the Canal Road. It moved a bit closer into town and is now in front of the big electronic appliance store, still directly on Huay Kaew road on the left side when driving towards the Canal Road intersection.
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| Thursday, 1-Apr-2004 00:00 |
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Khun Churn Vegetarian Buffet
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Very rustic look to the place. :)
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Buffet dishes
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Could do with a little more variety in dishes..
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NOTE: Khun Churn relocated to another soi of Nimmanhaemin Road. The new location looks MUCH MUCH nicer! It's I forgot the soi number, it's one soi up from where Fine Thanks pub is. So that would make it soi 5, possibly 7 or therabouts.
Yet another buffet place today. This one deserves mentioning because it's all vegetarian food, and I think the only such place in Chiang Mai, i.e. vegetarian food in a buffet concept. In every other sense it's less remarkable, and also the price is moderate at 55 baht, all you can eat including drinking water, a herbal drink and sweet desert.
Khun Churn used to have another location at the railway station but this has been closed for some time now, leaving just this one located in Nimmanhaemin Road Soi 11. I remember the buffet at the old place was quite a bit better, but perhaps I was just unlucky today.. Nothing glaringly wrong with it, but there could have been a little more variety I suppose, and with a fresher feel to the whole buffet presentation. It looked a little too much like they spread it out at 11am and then didn't top things up again until lunch time ends. (I was there at 12:15 or so, prime lunch time you'd say.) Still I'll give this place another try one of these days, it's a good option if you want to eat vegetarian (and then lots of it. )
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| Wednesday, 31-Mar-2004 00:00 |
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Boat Restaurant
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Boat Restaurant
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Clean & tidy interior, popular with CMU students.
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The 'Everything' "Boat Burger".. 28 baht!
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Here's an old favorite.. I remember coming her 10 years ago and it seems very little has changed. Boat is an almost American 'student-hangout' style restaurant. Actually many students go there because of the low prices and proximity to Chiang Mai University. There's many Thai standards on the menu, as well as some some favorite international ones, such as Western breakfasts, burgers, milkshakes, etc. Main strength I'd say is the price. It really is a very inexpensive place. Service is less consistent, you may get that one of the dishes you ordered arrives a lot later than the rest, and some waiters could be a little more attentive.. 0) Still I feel the good points far outweigh the bad, the good selection on the menu, having both fair Thai food as well as Western food, clean and tidy Western looking setting and surprisingly low price make this a good place especially for breakfast or lunch.
Western food is definitely not the main focus of my page, however one of these days I should get around recommending some candidates for 'the best hamburger' in Chiang Mai. And while the top-end will be better than this Boat Burger in terms of the bread & meat used and overall size, the inevitable price vs. quality ratio may very well swing Boat's way.. Because you will likely be able to get 4 (!) pretty decent Boat Burgers for the price of ONE burger at whatever 'proper' Western place comes out on top..
Boat Restaurant is on Huay Kaew Road, past the intersection with the Canal Road, before you get to Chiang Mai University. When driving towards CMU it's on the left side of the road.
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