Lanna food: five dishes to eat before you leave

Lanna ruled the North for six centuries from Chiang Mai, and its kitchen owes more to Shan State, Burma and Yunnan than to Bangkok. No palm sugar in everything, coconut milk in almost nothing, sticky rice instead of jasmine rice, and a preference for grilling, pounding and slow simmering over the wok.

Five dishes below, in the order we would eat them: three savoury, two sweet. For each one, what it actually is, where to find it in town, and the order of magnitude of the bill, at street prices in Chiang Mai, outside the tourist blocks, so treat them as a range rather than a menu.

Why the North does not cook like Bangkok

Three differences cover most of it. Rice first: up here it is sticky rice, khao niao, served in a woven basket and eaten with the hand, where the Centre eats jasmine rice with a spoon. Fat next: coconut milk is rare in the North, khao soi excepted; Lanna curries are built on water, pounded herbs and cooking time.

Then taste. Northern food is markedly less sweet, more bitter and more fermented than southern food: fermented soybean, pickled mustard greens, sour bamboo shoots. A good Lanna dish is not round in the mouth, it is blunt.

One last detail that changes a short trip: the North eats early. The best khao soi places open at dawn and close when the pot is empty, often before 3pm.

1. Khao soi: the dish that defines the city

Egg noodles in a yellow coconut curry coloured with turmeric and curry powder, with a chicken leg simmered until it falls off the bone. On top, a handful of crisp fried noodles. On the side, three things that are not garnish: raw shallot, pickled mustard greens, a wedge of lime.

The origin explains the taste. Muslim caravans from Yunnan, the Chin Haw, brought this dish down the Burma road. There is still a halal beef version around Charoenprathet, near the mosque.

How to eat it: break the fried noodles into the bowl, squeeze the lime, then add the roasted chilli paste one spoon at a time. The curry is mild as served: the heat is your decision, not the kitchen's.

2. Sai ua: the northern sausage

Minced pork worked through with lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaf, turmeric, shallot and chilli paste, coiled into a spiral and grilled slowly over charcoal. It is sold by weight and sliced in front of you, and it is eaten with sticky rice: a small ball of rice pressed between the fingers, one slice of sausage, nothing else.

That slice is also the test of a good stall. Sai ua should look green with herbs when cut, not evenly pink. If the coil is turning over the coals and locals are queueing, you are in the right place.

It travels well over a half day out, badly over a full one: this is fresh grilled pork, not cured charcuterie.

Which evening market to walk to

Where sai ua is sold by weight: the ground floor of Warorot

3. Gaeng hang lay: the curry of feast days

Pork belly simmered for hours with julienned fresh ginger, tamarind, garlic, peanuts and a masala inherited from the Burmese caravans. Not a drop of coconut milk: the sauce is pork fat and time. The result is sweet and sour, deeply fragrant, and barely hot at all.

It is a ceremonial dish (weddings, merit-making, the khantoke tray), so it is rarely street food. Order it in a Lanna restaurant, to share, with sticky rice and a vegetable.

Two addresses have held up for years: Huen Phen on Ratchamanka, inside the old walls, and Huen Muan Jai north of Nimman near Ratchaphuek. Book or come early, neither is a secret.

4. Khao taen: the sweet one that crunches

Discs of sticky rice dried in the sun then dropped into hot oil, where they puff into blistered rounds, finished with a thread of reduced cane sugar. The northern version worth looking for is soaked in watermelon juice before drying, khao taen nam taeng mo, faintly pink and faintly fruity.

It is barely a dessert: you eat it like crisps, at the end of a meal or on a bus. The sugar is only a glaze; what you taste is toasted rice.

It is also the one edible souvenir on this list that survives the flight home: light, unbreakable if you pack it well, and it does not melt. Once the bag is open, though, one humid day is enough to soften it.

5. Khao lam: coconut rice roasted in bamboo

Sticky rice, coconut milk, sugar and black beans, sometimes taro, packed into a length of green bamboo, plugged with banana leaf and roasted upright around a fire for hours. You peel the bamboo back along the fibres like a banana and eat the warm cylinder of rice in your hand.

The smell comes as much from the scorched bamboo as from the coconut, and that is what separates it from every other sweet rice in the country. Look for it early, while it is still warm; yesterday's tubes are dry.

One honest word about the dessert you will be offered everywhere else: mango sticky rice is excellent, but it belongs to central Thailand, not to the North, and outside mango season from March to May the fruit has travelled a long way.

6. The tray that comes with everything else

None of these dishes is eaten alone up here. Two dips turn up on every table and deserve one order at least: nam prik noom, green chillies and garlic charred then pounded in a mortar, smoky and sometimes ferocious, and nam prik ong, made with tomato and pork, mild and easy for a first try. Both arrive with steamed vegetables, raw cabbage and khaep mu, the fried pork crackling that remains the best utensil ever invented.

The khantoke, that round teak tray served at dinner shows, is exactly this line-up: hang lay, sai ua, both nam prik, khaep mu, sticky rice. The food is good and the price follows the dancing. The same meal in a neighbourhood Lanna restaurant costs a third of it, without the show.

Ordering without getting it wrong

Sticky rice is eaten with the fingers of the right hand: take a little, press it into a ball, use it to pick things up. Jasmine rice comes with a fork and a spoon: the fork pushes, the spoon goes to the mouth. Chopsticks only come out for noodles.

For heat, two phrases are enough: mai phet for not spicy, phet nit noi for a little. There are almost always four pots on the table (sugar, dried chilli, chilli vinegar, fish sauce), and that is where seasoning is finished, by each person for themselves.

Vegetarian is harder here than in Bangkok: most Lanna dishes contain pork or fish sauce. The word jay means strict vegan and it is understood, but at a street stall it often removes half the menu. A cooking class, by contrast, adapts without argument.

Last habit worth having: eat where local people are eating, and eat at local hours. Lunch in the North runs from about 11am to 1pm, dinner from 5pm or 6pm, and plenty of stalls do not open twice.

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