Northern Thai & Lanna in Chiang Mai

The North was its own kingdom until the end of the nineteenth century, and Lanna food still eats like a separate cuisine rather than a regional accent. Sticky rice replaces jasmine rice as the staple and is eaten with the fingers. Coconut milk, which does most of the heavy lifting in Southern and Central Thai cooking, is comparatively rare. The flavour axis runs bitter, salty and herbal rather than sweet-and-sour, and the Burmese and Shan influence that arrived over the border is present in dishes you will not see on a Bangkok menu.

What that means at the table: sai ua, a coiled grilled sausage loud with lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaf and turmeric; gaeng hang le, a Burmese-descended pork belly curry built on ginger, tamarind and peanuts with no coconut milk in it, better reheated the next day; nam prik num and nam prik ong, the roasted-green-chilli and tomato-pork chilli dips that arrive with a plate of raw and blanched vegetables and crisp pork rind; and khao soi, which the city has since exported to the world.

This category also carries the starkest split on the whole site. Almost every entry below is a MICHELIN Guide pick, and almost none of them carries a crowd rating. That is not a coincidence and it is not a data failure — it is what happens when the inspectors and the review platforms are answering different questions.

How to use this list

Order for the table, not for yourself. A Lanna meal is a set of dishes eaten together over a communal basket of sticky rice, and ordering one main each produces a worse meal than ordering four things between four people. Two dips, a curry, a grill, vegetables.

Use the sticky rice as the cutlery. Pinch a small amount, roll it into a ball against your fingers, dent it, scoop. The chilli dips are designed to be eaten this way and are unpleasantly intense eaten by the spoonful.

Take the guide entries seriously and the empty columns lightly. Where a row below shows nothing under Google or TripAdvisor, that is our data telling you the shop is not on the English-language ranked lists. The MICHELIN listing is the signal.