Chiang Mai is the second-largest city in Thailand, the original seat of the Lan Na Kingdom, which reigned in 1296 and for five hundred more years. It’s known for its three hundred Buddhist temples, their roofs like pointed pushpins embedded across the city’s landscape, nestled between trees and cafés, neighborhoods and back alleys. There is an ancient moat enclosing the city center, drawing a seven-hundred-year-old fence around travel agency storefronts, burger chains, massage parlors, Mexican restaurants, dentist offices, women selling smoothies from blenders on wheeled carts, expensive French restaurants, and coffee shops with free Wi-Fi. Motorcycles are ubiquitous, the chosen cheap travel method of the masses. Second in popularity are songthaews, red pickup trucks with benches along the length of their beds and enclosed with tall roofs, the shared taxi system used by both tourists and locals. These, plus tuk-tuks, the three-wheeled motorbike taxis, all vie for space on Chiang Mai roads, their drivers using horns merely to let others know of their presence, not to tell them to move. It’s a jarring practice to a Western driver new to these streets.
Chiang Mai is ancient; Chiang Mai is modern. It is Buddhist monks and smoothies from electric blenders. There are five Starbucks coffee shops in the city of fewer than four hundred thousand people, an impressive concentration outside the United States. The city is a popular respite for vagabonds in need of cheap accommodations and Western creature comforts.
It’s also home to the second-largest concentration of Buddhists in the world, and its streets are filled with pilgrims during the Songkran and Loy Krathong festivals. At night, the old city center beams a fluorescent glow from carts selling mango sticky rice, coconut soup, knockoff Birkenstock sandals, and flowing sarong-style pants bought only by tourists. From makeshift outdoor corner studios, artists sketch portraits of children in photos to be sent home as souvenirs for grandparents. T-shirts are silk-screened with beer logos, Che Guevara, and the phrase “Same same but different,” vernacular used by vendors as an answer to a potential buyer’s question about the validity of the brand-name item for sale. A loose translation is: It is, and also, it is not. This phrase summarizes Chiang Mai in a nutshell. It smells of familiarity, but it also really, truly doesn’t. It feels like home, and yet it always surprises.
I wish I were a more adventurous eater. I will eat spices and peppers with poised composure, but I hesitate at unidentifiable meats even when I’m famished. My plate will pile with vegetables and meats and sauces so long as none of it smiles at me. Edible creatures must also be solidly dead, the overriding reason why I avoided scorpions on a stick on Wangfujing Street in Beijing, still fighting for life and blindly swatting their pincers in the air. Never put things down your gullet that could slash it in final vengeance on the way down—this is my gastronomic philosophy.
Tonight, I am hungry. A novice traveler could write an entire book solely devoted to the foreign cuisine offerings of northern Thailand, beginning in its French cafés and patisseries—scents of caramelized sugar and baked croissants wafting out their open doors reminding you of a Parisian boulevard—and ending with its offering of fish and chips served on the back porch of a neoclassical Georgian plantation home, crickets singing in the night air like a southern summer. A traveler can dine on pineapple pancakes under banana trees for breakfast, green chiles rellenos and margaritas for lunch, and rib-eye steaks with mashed potatoes and pints of German lager for dinner. Our wallets would be empty if we feasted only on foreign food, which is why it is best in Chiang Mai, as it generally is everywhere, to stick to local fare.
Thai food tastes like ocean and timeworn tradition, fields of basil and groves of mango. Streetwise cooks in aprons and flip-flops stir salty tamarind through rice noodles and hand patrons limes to squeeze over their bowls. Paired with glugs of Singha bubbling water, and it is the best three-dollar investment of your life.
There are passion fruit smoothies from street vendors and strawberry ice cream churned along late-night touristy streets; there is the gaeng khae soup with chiles and miso from the cheap diner in our quiet suburb, so spicy it makes me cry. My eyes water as it’s placed on the table, even after my request for no spice. This is Thai food.
Tonight, we find a hovel of a shop with the plain name of Cooking Love, tucked deep into the side streets in the old city center. Guidebooks and travel writers rave over this mom-and-pop eatery, and here on our first visit, the owner brings our children over to watch the kitchen chaos. The three of them tiptoe on chairs and peer over the Plexiglas shell.
“Hey! A ten-minute date,” Kyle jokes. Children are welcome to be children here in Thailand. Their curiosity is well received, and it proffers us a few minutes of adult conversation.
“Don’t you wonder about places like this?” Kyle says. “What’s this family’s backstory? How long have they been running this place? What was the tipping point that made it so popular?”
I watch the mom and son work in tandem in the kitchen, flash-frying vegetables in a wok and stirring milky-green curry in a stockpot. The teenage daughter takes an order from a table of European twenty-somethings. An old wrinkled man with a toothless grin, presumably the owner’s father, welcomes patrons at the entrance, takes their shoes, and meticulously places them on shelves.
“I wonder if that guy was the one who started this place,” I say, pointing to the elderly man. I picture him young and spritely, scooping bowls of rice and welcoming curious new guests. He smiles and nods at me. I nod back.
“I wonder if the whole family lives here too,” Kyle says, just as I was speculating the same thing. I glance at the back of the restaurant, where a curtain hides a mysterious back half, and I imagine a living room and residential kitchen.
Photos of previous customers wallpaper the walls, Polaroids signed, dated, and faded. The four-top next to us speaks Russian, and on the other side are Australians. The cook brings us our orders, and I dip my spoon into the green curry, glide it out between my lips, and close my eyes. The kids eagerly spoon their plates of chicken fried rice, and Kyle buries his chopsticks into noodles. Steam rises from our plates. Our table overflows with bowls and there are leftovers, and our total bill is ten dollars.