How to Eat Chiang Mai Noodles

Beef khao soi with all the fixins at Khao Soi Samerjai

The second time around, Phil and I were in Chiang Mai for six nights, six mornings, and nine breakfast bowls of khao soi. It would have been ten, except Phil felt ill one morning and, in a true demonstration of his illness, did not partake of the curative Chiang Mai Noodles. I did not waver in my devotion, and had the same (same but different!) breakfast five days in a row, at three different noodle shops, all of which were a convenient scoot-distance from our guesthouse. Although khao soi is typically a lunch or afternoon food, there were no lack of locals in any of the restaurants when we went (usually around 9 am), and it was most convenient for our long-distance itineraries to Lamphun and Wiang Kum Kam. We had to fit in our noodle fix sometime.

There's nothing quite like it: chewy egg noodles and tender meat, redolent with thick red curry and chili paste, topped with coconut cream, crackly deep-fried noodles and cilantro leaves. It's slightly sweet, spicy, a little smoky, and utterly addictive. Every bowl comes with a side plate of pickles, shallots, lime, and nam prik paow, a sweet-hot roasted chili sauce without which no bowl is complete. Each noodle shop has their own slight spin, with different meat options—beef, pork, chicken—again changing the flavor, because each stock is different. Plus,  big principle of eating in Southeast Asia is that tables have a host of ingredients on them—hot, sour, salty, sweet, monosodium glutamate—for the diner to adjust the flavors, so no two bowls are ever really alike.

Neon chicken khao soi at Khao Soi Prince...

...and the very different beef version.

Khao soi probably originated with the Yunnanese Muslims, who from the 18th to early 20th century traded their way through Burma, Thailand, and Laos in horse and mule-pulled caravans. Khao soi literally means “cut rice” in Thai, which is a curious thing because there is no rice, cut or otherwise, in a bowl. The name probably dates to the dense blocks of dried, cooked rice that these traders carried on their journeys down the Silk Road, centuries ago. At dinner time, these blocks were sliced into soups of wild game and vegetables, making for a filling meal that was easy on the packmule. Once the noodles had migrated down to Chiang Mai, coconut milk was added to appeal to the increased number of Bangkok dignitaries dining in the city; this was probably around the time that pork was introduced as a possible protein, meaning the dish was no longer necessarily halal. For further reading, here's a brief and wondrously compelling article on khao soi, which isn't as in-depth as the master's thesis that one Chiang Mai University student wrote.

Behind the scenes at Khao Soi Samerjai

In modern Chiang Mai, you can’t throw a chopstick without it landing in a bowl of khao soi. This doesn’t guarantee, however, that it’ll be a bowl of good khao soi. The curry paste that forms the base of the broth is a complicated thing—involving the smoking of many chilis—and a restaurant that doesn’t specialize in it is going to be pretty lackluster. This is a pretty good rule for most any restaurant in Thailand, actually. A place that has everything on the menu isn’t going to do any of those things memorably. Here are some guidelines:

1. Keep an eye out for specialist shops with a small menu, most of which are variations on a theme. The best duck soup we had came from a tiny restaurant that served six dishes only, all of which featured various permutations of roast duck with rice, rice noodles, enigmatic green noodles, assorted vegetables, and broth. Or regional restaurants, like one specializing in food from Issaan (Northeast Thailand), which will have a wider range of food but only from that particular place (no pad thai here).
2. The less English is spoken, the better. Most restaurants will have at least a little bit of English, but the more broken the English, the better the dish is going to be. A prime example: boiling machine in fuffalo, which turned out to be a great water buffalo innards version of sindard, or Lao hotpot.
3. Pictures demonstrating dishes are ubiquitous, and very helpful if you can’t read either Thai or Romanized Thai script. When in doubt, if you see something particularly appetizing at a neighboring table, ask for a plate yourself. Or win friends and smiles by learning some basic Thai (including culinary Thai) and carrying around a phrase book for those indecipherable (but bound to be delicious) dishes. 
4. The best restaurants usually look a little worse for wear, with dusty faded signs and tacky decorations. This is good: it means the most important thing is the food. 
5. Most importantly: there should tons of Thais at the table, slurping noodles or sitting on their scooters waiting for bags of take-away.

But, pray tell, how can you tell whether a restaurant specializes in khao soi? Generally there are plastic sacks of crispy thin noodles in the window. And then there’s the name. Here are our top three restaurants dishing it up:

Khao Soi Samer Jai: 391 Charoenraj Road (+66-53-242-928)
Khao Soi Prince: 105-109 Th Kaew Nawarat, near Prince Royals College (+66-53-242-446)
Khao Soi Lam Duan Fah Ham: 352/22 Charoenraj Road (+66-53-243-519)

They make it very hard for us poor falang. Here’s a map, with yellow markers indicating khoa soi joints and pink indicating others, which we will write about soon.

 
View Khao Soi in Chiang Mai in a larger map