[balex]

A few notes from Chiang mai -- I will try to add some mobile phone food porn later, plus contact details if you want.

Braised pork noodles. (25 baht a bowl = about 30p/ 60c.)

This place started off just as a shack, and has now grown to be a reasoanble size open restaurant.
The dish here is pork which is stewed on the bone, very slowly. You get a few chunks of the bones, with very tender meat that can be stripped off. Wide rice noodles, a little bit of green vegetable, a few bean sprouts, some sweet basil. A broth, thickened very slightly with blood (apparently, though this wasn't very noticeable). Topped with a few strips of crackling and fried garlic. The broth ... this was so good, rather Chinese, sweet with five spice and porky goodness. I had a second bowl since they were quite small.

Salty Guava juice to drink. I don't get the salt in fruit juice thing at all.


Khao soi

This is the famous chiang mai dish of chicken curry noodle soup. If you have ever had this you will know how good this can be. Quite a rich cocounutbroth with egg noodles
We had this at one of the two or three places that do it very well. We also had some pork satay and little crispy deep fried cakes of tiny freshwater shrimp served with sweet chilli sauce.

These two noodle things were the nicest things I have had to eat for some time.

Come Dara

This is a newish place serving northern food, but it was a bit of a letr down. Apparently the food was a bit sub par. A good laab, a very good burmese curry of belly pork, some good stir fried mushrooms (these were I think matsutake mushrooms grown for export to Japan. A poor, overly dry fluffy catfish salad, a few other things. It could be worth going back, because the food is interesting and I was assured it could be better.


Fujian in Oriental Hotel, Chiang Mai

This is a fairly high end cantonese/HK place in a fancy hotel. We had some pigeon with lime juice and salt and pepper that was really good, a roast suckling pig (good but too fatty), very good peking duck served first pacncakes and secondly as laab. A very good vegetable dish of braised baby bok choy, withan excellent seafood sauce. This was a real standout dish -- of a type that I normally hate. Very much better than anything in London. Some bird's nest soup with bamboo fungus. Very good texture to the birds nest with an good cleanly flavoured beef broth. This is worth going too if you want some good service, air conditioning etc. This was London/HK priced but really worth it.

[balex]

Khao soi:

Pork satay (note the small cube of pork fat at the end of each one)

Shrimp cakes with sweet chilli sauce

And the shop itself . It is failry easy to get too ; there were a few other foreigners there.

[balex]

Pork noodle dish

This is on the road out of the back of the military airport.


They have an airconditioned room; we didn't use it for some reason, though the heat is pretty brutal at this time of year.

[balex]

An interesting foodstuff: .

This is a Laotian product from Luang Prabang. It is dried river weed from the Mekong, with garlic, sesame seeds and a little bit of tomato. It has an amazing appearance, it looks like an embroidered cloth.
Quite nori like in flavour though it is freshwater.