vegan Chiang Mai

With Happy Cow listing 68 vegan/vegetarian restaurants in Chiang Mai (compared to a mere 25 in Melbourne), do you need any more reasons to Northern Thailand? 

Chiang Mai is home to over 300 Buddhist temples, hundreds of eateries and a haven for travellers in Asia who don't want shrimp paste in their curry. As we spent 9 days in Chiang Mai, it was a relief that vegan choices beyond the standard curries and Pad Thai abound. Every meal ranged from good to spectacular, including breakfast in our hotel (which, let’s face it, in the best of places can get a bit samey after a few days). The kitchen was always happy to make a vegan hot breakfast to order for the Significant Eater, usually rice or noodle based, supplementing the dazzling array of tropical fruit, salad, sticky rice in banana leaves and amazing juices and iced teas. Vegetarian choices also included eggs cooked to order (my favourite being a Thai omelette with fresh herbs and chilli), pancakes and savoury rice porridge.

We ate most of our meals in the Old City but two of my three top vegan picks are beyond the moat. Keep in mind getting around is easy. For a mere 20 baht (less than a dollar) you can jump in a shared ‘taxi’ (converted ute/pick up truck) or 50 baht for a tuk tuk. For a day trip we found a mid-priced car and driver for 1500 baht (about $50).

Best of the omni cafes

Chiang Mai does casual dinning well. Want breakfast, coffee, a beer, late lunch or a three course dinner? These two laid back gems mightn’t look like anything special but warranted return visits. Both offered free wifi, good vegan choices and a relaxed atmosphere.

1. Peppermint cafe 1/1 Soi 5 Rachadamnoen Rd

The menu is a blend of Thai and Western food, including a fusion of both. If you want your salad ‘Thai style’ with extra spice, you will get a fiery hit. One of their specialties is pizza and they didn’t flinch at whipping up a vegan one (the SE said it was the best vegan pizza he’d ever eaten).

2. Nature’sWay Moon Muang Soi 4

The signs proudly state they don't use MSG. Food is fresh and sometimes organically grown. The vegetarian tom yum soup and noodles were free of fishy additives. I loved their big noodles with tofu and vegetables. Friendly staff, who remember your face and welcome you back. 

Note: my affection for these cafes was probably heightened by cuddles from neighbourhood cats that stopped by for a smooch.

Top three vego eateries in Chiang Mai

Sadly we only sampled a handful of the dozens of vegetarian restaurants but these three stood out for the diversity and sheer yumminess of the food. 

1. Pun Pun 

Wander through the grounds of Suan Dok temple and look for the ‘monk chat’ sign. Pun Pun, an al fresco café, lies beyond. 

Pun Pun is run by a sustainable living community and showcases their own organic vegetables. The menu is large and varied. My soup, with nori and a beetroot sauce, was certainly not traditional Thai and defied culinary pigeonholing. Even the spring rolls offered a novel filling. This is a great daytime café (they have a new restaurant  further out at the base of the hills that stays open til 8pm), perfect for when you get bored of the usual suspects and want to explore new flavours. Check the website for opening hours (the first time I looked at the site it said ‘closed Wednesday’, the next time it didn’t mention it). Avoid if it’s raining, as there’s very little cover in a downpour.

2. Bodhi Zen 18/5 Ratchvithi Road, Sriphim, Chiang Mai (not far from Thapae Gate)

Did you hear about the Vietnamese monk who opened a vegetarian restaurant in Northern Thailand? Offering ‘world cuisine’, this is another excellent choice for when you want to eat something a little different. The rice balls and cabbage rolls were both spectacular. While the meal was amazing, it was a chaotic and slightly uncomfortable dinning experience (for many, many reasons). But the food is worth it. Really.

3. Radiance Restaurant (at The Spa Resort) 165 Moo 4 Tumbon Huaysai, Chiang Mai 

About 40 minutes from the Old City in the grounds of a health resort, Radiance is an upmarket restaurant on the rural fringe of Chiang Mai. The verdant setting is calm and indeed ‘radiant’. I pity those who pay a lot of money to stay here and choose the detox package. While the menu lists a wide range of delicious juices for those fasting, even reading the description of the dishes must drive them wild. Though not strictly a vego restaurant (they offer some fish and chicken) they also have  extensive raw food options (the lasagne was a work of art and the raw chocolate dessert is worth a trip to Thailand in itself). Despite not being a fan of mock meat, the 'duck' curry was one of the most emotionally satisfying meals of my holiday. It also serves booze, something many of vego eateries avoid. This place earns the accolade of gourmet, though expensive by local standards is still significantly cheaper than at home. Worth a detour.

Other food-worthy mentions

Coffee: While Chiang Mai professes to having a ‘coffee culture’, including its home grown answer to Starb*cks, the espressos I sampled were very ordinary. With one notable exception. Akha Ama's  beans are organic and sustainably grown in Northern Thailand. They’re serious about their product, have a good rig and train their baristas. I’m not kidding when I say this is possibly the best espresso I’ve ever drunk. They do a mean iced green tea, like no other (possibly with powdered green tea?)

I frequently visited their new café at La Fattoria, Rachadamnoen Rd (past the police station, near Wat Phrasingh).

Markets: There are a plethora of wet markets selling fresh produce, if you want to pick up a kilo mangosteens for less than a dollar. My favourite was San Pakoy, just across the river, perfect for an early morning walk. (Non-vegans might want to try breakfast from the many carts near the market or outside the night bazaar, for some real but undeniably meaty street food).

The Sunday Walking market along Rachadamnoen Rd offers a number of vegan goodies including noodles, barbecued corn and stuffed betel leaves. Don’t forget to take a break between grazing and stop for a foot massage.

Cooking: There are a truck-load of cooking schools in Chiang Mai but I'd heard grumbles that some use vegan-unfriendly curry pastes. We spent a delightful day in the country at Thai Farm Cooking School, on a small organic farm, where we cooked everything from scratched. As you cook your own dishes, there's no problems being in a mixed omni/veg*n class. We had a fun day, visited a local market, cooked a soup, curry, stir fry, noodles and sticky rice...and patted some nice cats.

Maps. The Nancy Chandler map is a Chiang Mai institution, now in it’s 19^th edition. It plots a pleasing amount of V’s for vegetarian, along with non-food things to do in town. Don’t forget to check online for updates (unlike us, who didn’t and went on a thwarted hunt for the cat sanctuary and wooden foot bridge). You can pick up your map from any of the bookstores in Chiang Mai selling English language books. 

Want more tips? Check out my entry on Chiang Mai in my travel blog.

ANZAC biscuit-free zone

For the last few days we’ve been working our way through these ridiculously small but highly perfumed fruit. Home grown and picked by one of the guys at the market, last week I got a kilo of these under-sized feijoas for less than the price of a coffee. Each time I enter the kitchen, it’s like coming home. Literally. My olfactory senses tell me I’m back in New Zealand. The small, taste and texture is pure nostalgia.



This week I also made my first green curry paste from scratch, ridiculous considering how many other curries I make from first principles. I based it on this recipe throwing in more liberal quantities of most ingredients (including lots more green chillies) and omitting the coriander root, being the only herb I was out of. At first I was very disappointed. Yes the flavours had a vibrancy to them but the concoction didn't knock my socks off. Then I remembered the paste is only half of the flavour balance. After frying off the fresh paste and then simmering with coconut milk, I got out the fish sauce, palm sugar and split open a lime. A Thai curry is an alchemical process. The paste may be the base metal but it's the final three ingredients that create the magic.

Staring at me accusingly in the kitchen is also a bag of lemons, gifted from a visitor from over the border. I’ve been hanging out to make more lemonade, a perfect antidote to the unseasonably balmy weather of late.

No ANZAC biscuits for me, to commemorate the day instead I’ve a round up of old posts from my Grandfather’s WWI diary at my other blog, there’s also a post on what he ate at the front, in hospital and at Christmas while waiting to be shipped off from camp in my archives.

Enjoy the long weekend, take a leaf out of Princess Prissy Paws book and take it easy!

AWOL

Like our wayward cat, I’ve been absent without leave lately.

It has been a strange few weeks. While not blogging my fingers have still clocked up a record amount of keystrokes writing content for a website I've launched for my other life. The toil and RSI has been worth it but I have needed a break from the keyboard to recover.

Just when I thought I was getting my mojo back one of our cats went missing. I know felines tend to wander, one of my childhood kitties went away for months yet returned in good shape. But this particular creature is a 14 yo Siamese who until last month had never left the house or the garden before. 24 hours later she turned up, loud and hungry and now won’t leave my side. We are both a bit tired as a result of the middle of the night reunion.

But this is a trivial matter compared to events in my home town with the wonderful Maranui SLC and café burning down and worse, my friend The Editter’s recent cancer diagnosis (she’s reinstated her blog and is happy for you to pop by and cheer her on).

So what about the food?

I’ve been keeping it simple:

At least once a week am having a “detox” meal featuring seasonal steamed vegetables.

Whipped up some arepas on the weekend to eat with a bowl of chilli beans.

Making dry-style curries with fresh turmeric and ginger plus roasted and ground spices. How easy is it to toss some cumin, coriander seeds and chilli in a pan and pound them once toasted? Fry off some onion, garlic, ginger and turmeric with the other spices, toss in diced potato, add water as required to keep it moist, then cauliflower and any other vegetables that tempt you. Top up with water as needed, add salt til the flavours come together, toss through a generous handful of coriander leaves before serving and there you have it, a basic curry packed with flavour.

Made a variation on The Moosewood Cookbook’s satay sauce* – though I substituted peanut butter with cashew butter, used some lovely palm sugar for sweetness and (no doubt to Molly Katzen’s horror) added fish sauce for salt. Delish!

Out in the world, hit Victoria Street and had a REAL vegetarian soup at a Vietnamese restaurant. The stock was authentically vegetable-based, not chicken in disguise. To carnivores this may sound like a trivial matter but with the world of pho and all the other fragrant, spicy Asian soups closed to those who eschew meat – it was an exciting find. There were other highlights on the menu but I need a few return visits before I can do the place justice in a review. (I did however fire off a red-hot email to my favourite local vegetarian duo to share the find).


Here’s to a calmer month!


* The Moosewood was one of the first vegetarian cookbooks I ever owned. I get nostalgic whenever I open the pages. The peanut sauce was my all time favourite and I remember making it for a dinner party I went to hosted by a work colleague. I was the youngest by far and everyone seemed so glamorous and politically correct. Whilst dipping artful bundles of carrot sticks into the sauce there was a heated discussion about phone tapping - it seemed we all were convinced that the NZ secret squirrels were interested in our personal calls. In reality, they likely were. I know for a fact my housemates at the time had ASIO files. I can't make satay sauce these days without it feeling like a subversive act!

The 1 week wheat-free challenge: Day 7

2 x boiled eggs on pretend gluten-free toast.

Pad Thai with prawns (rice noodles, prawns and minimal other ingredients – egg, tofu, veg plus fish sauce and peanuts).

Seared tuna (medium rare) with leftover Sri Lankan curry (a surprisingly good combo).

2 x mandarins.

Dagoba chocolate

Fluids: 1 espresso, 1 brandy and soda, 1 peppermint and liquorice herbal tea, water.

Notes: I’d planned to eat out at my local Thai restaurant for the final night of the challenge but the SE vetoed this due to the amount of leftovers we were accumulating. So the Pad Thai for lunch, not my usual choice, was an attempt to find a half decent Thai meal and choose what I’d usually have.

The GF bread still tasted crap and I struggled to finish an otherwise enjoyable breakfast.

So you want another pussy pic?


So the challenge is over. There were no breaches that I was aware of. Tomorrow I'll post about what I learnt from the experience. Thanks for your support over this week.