Chiang Mai Food Tour

In my afternoon post from today, I told you if you were nice people I might publish a bonus evening post today to make up for my slow afternoon. I’m going to assume you were nice. Here’s the bonus post.

I enjoyed the food tour I took in Bangkok so much that I decided to take one in Chiang Mai too. I did that this evening.

This narrative on the Chiang Mai food tour won’t be as detailed as the one I did for the Bangkok food tour. There are a couple of reasons for that. On the Bangkok food tour, the guide gave us a small sheet of paper listing each of the dishes we had. This time, the guide gave us about ten or so letter-size pages stapled together. It provided English and Thai (transliterated into English) of:

• common food types (e.g., rice, khao; chicken, gai)
• phrases associated with eating (e.g., does it taste good?, aroy mai?; I have not eaten yet, mai dai gin khao)
• Eating etiquette habits in Thailand
• Descriptions of popular Thai dishes
• Thailand’s top street food dishes

However, the pages did not include a list of the dishes we ate on the tour. My memory, or rather, lack thereof, will not allow me to repeat and describe all of the dishes here.

Another thing that might shorten this entry is that it’s now very late, and I’m very tired. So, I’m probably going to try to wrap this up quickly. So it will likely be shorter and have even more typos than usual.

On the Chiang Mai Food Tour

There were only three customers on the food tour tonight, including me. The guide, who picked us up individually in a regular car, introduced himself as Mr. Goal. I think Goal was his first name. When he picked me up, despite having my full name on the booking, he greeted me as Mr. Joel.

(Goal says he has twelve people tomorrow night, and he uses a bigger vehicle for big groups. I imagine fitting twelve people into a standard-size sedan, particularly after they’ve eaten a ton of food, would be a painful experience.)

I was the second person to be picked up. Mr. Goal introduced the customer who was already there as Ms. Loraine. The third person to be picked up was introduced as Mr. Daniel. After a while, Goal dropped the “Mr.” and “Ms.” and just used our first names. He then became just Goal.

Of the other two passengers, the guy was from Vienna, Austria. The woman was from, wait for it, … Canada. Calgary, to be precise.

Unlike the Bangkok walking food tour, where we had just one dish at most of the stops and walked between all of the stops, the Chiang Mai food tour was not a walking tour. Gaol drove us to a couple of places where we had a few dishes at each.

The first stop was a restaurant, but for big-city Westerners, that probably gives the wrong impression. The roof of the restaurant was corrugated metal, and the floor and walls were bare concrete. The tables were rustic. And the lighting in the place was quite dim.

The food, however, was delicious. It was all very flavorful. The dishes had varying degrees of spiciness, but none that I found especially close to being unbearable. There were a couple of dishes that were bordering on it, but they did not cross the line.

The second stop was at a two-part market—one part on either side of a cross-street—where we made a couple of food stops within that.

We also had one dish standing at one of the food stalls. That was a Thai coconut pudding. The pudding is sealed into some sort of wonton-shaped fried dough. It was delicious.

Sticky rice was served with the dishes at the first restaurant, but there was also a mango sticky rice dish toward the end of the tour for dessert. It might have been the best mango I’ve ever tasted. The mangoes are probably a lot fresher here than the ones that have to be shipped into Canada.

Other interesting dishes included spring rolls. One was a vegetable spring roll. That wasn’t the interesting one. There was also a banana spring roll. It had the same sort of shell as a normal spring roll, but it was filled with banana and drizzled with chocolate. The banana was much more flavorful than the bananas we get at home. I don’t know if it’s a different variety, or just fresher than we can get in Canada, but there is a difference.

At the first restaurant, the other guy on the tour mentioned that he doesn’t usually eat meat. He made exceptions. Many of the dishes involved chicken or pork. I don’t think there were any dishes he didn’t at least try.

But to make up for his skimping on the meat, Goal ordered him a Pad Thai at one stop. But it wasn’t like any Pad Thai I’ve ever seen. It was normal Pad Thai, but served in an omelette. The portion was large, and he let us try it. It was delicious.

Oh, I almost forgot. At the first restaurant, one of the dishes was Chiang Mai sausage. I mentioned on my first day here that I tried some based on a recommendation from the guide on the Bangkok walking food tour. The one I had tonight was much more spicy and tasty than the one I had last night. It might have been the spiciest dish of the evening.

As I said earlier, I can’t remember all of the dishes. I hope the accompanying pictures of them will suffice.

I will sum up by repeating that the food was delicious and adding that I am completely stuffed. It was a heck of a lot of food.