Eat & Drink in Chiang Mai

Eating is the easiest thing to get right in Chiang Mai and the easiest thing to get lazy about. A visitor can eat well here for a week without ever leaving the trail of places that appear in every guidebook. A resident who does the same for a year has missed most of it.

This section covers both halves of the scene. Restaurants and Thai food handles Northern Thai (Lanna) cuisine, the dishes worth learning, where to eat khao soi, and the street food and market stalls that make up most of the good eating in this city. Cafés and coffee covers the specialty roasters, the northern Thai beans behind them, and the cafés that genuinely welcome a laptop for three hours.

We name places. Vague recommendations help nobody, and a guide that will not tell you where to actually go is not a guide.