Our family’s experience: Japanese street food fest at a Chiang Mai shopping mall
If we have figured out anything about Chiang Mai, it’s that this Thai city also loves Japanese food.
Whenever we have gone out, our hired car passes by restaurants with red lanterns outside, a traditional Japanese symbol noting a restaurant was at hand. Sushi, ramen, and more have beckoned. As much as we love Thai food, it is beyond wonderful to see one of our other favorite cuisines held in such high esteem in a country we adore.
Then, as it turns out, Chiang Mai’s love of Japanese food came practically to our front door.
About ten minutes walk from our rental, a stroll down an alley takes you to the entrance to the Central Festival, one of Chiang Mai’s most prominent shopping centers. You’ll find common household brand names here. You’ll also find a food court full of dozens of different vendors.
Among the various booths, the Land of the Rising Sun has plenty of presence: Beard Papa’s creme puffs. A sushi place (that the kids ate at pretty much every time we came here for a meal). A yuzu-focused juice and smoothie bar. Even a food stall where you could order up hot, freshly made takoyaki (a sort of octopus-filled popover) and okonomiyaki, the “Japanese pizza” of cabbage, sauces, and mystical forces that may well tie the universe together. Well, perhaps it’s not that profound. But anything as versatile, delicious, and as inexplicable as okonomiyaki surely has a lot more to it than dinner.
Yet it turns out that timing was in our favor: Outside, on the main promenade at the Central Festival’s entrance, we found ourselves before rows and rows of pointed roofs, narrow wee food stalls at what a wide black banner said was for the Yatai Festival.
But what, you ask, is “yatai?”
Yatai, it turns out, is a Japanese word that literally means “shop stand.” Yatai are typically small, mobile food stalls, or what in the US we might call food carts or food trucks.
Now, just minutes from our rental, we could wander up and down a grid of dozens of yatai, serving up ramen, grilled squid on sticks, and even soulful, simple, earthy yellow Japanese curry.
Thai food is resplendent, transcendent, in its bright, aromatic combinations, where earthy and funky ingredients become a whole that is the best of all their parts. Yet Japanese food, and especially Japanese street food, is the satisfying, gratifying, soul food of life. It’s hearty yet light, restrained yet deliciously joyous.
Over iced soy milk, iced green tea, frozen slushy orange Fantas, pork and chicken skewers, and both pork curry rice and chicken curry rice, we sat on some steps next to a bunch of teenagers cosplaying as characters from a popular anime whose name I tried to catch but never quite made out. The warm evening settled over us, and the simply yet well-prepared food filled us. All around, a thick crowd sat at tables, wondered from yatai to yatai, and filled the aisles and rows of street food almost as thick as street traffic in a Bangkok rush hour.
Yet the same sense was all around us too. Appreciation. Delight. Hearty food, affordable, well made, and fun.
When you get down to it, that’s what captivated me about Thailand ever since my first visit in 2003. There’s a sense that food is good, and that food should be approachable, affordable, accessible. And a sense that, so too, should be life.
We ate our fill. And finished it all with a few mochi. Then we wandered the lights and stalls, content and together, full in belly—and full in heart.
