Wherever you go in Chiang Mai, the food is outstanding, says novelist Deepti Kapoor

I've lived in India all my life, eaten everywhere from Leh to Cochin, tasted extraordinary dishes by the humblest chaat wala and the fanciest chef, but nowhere in my land, not in Delhi, Mumbai, Goa, Hyderabad or Kolkata, have I eaten so well, so cheaply, so grandly and with so much joy as in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai.

Even without the food, it’s a kind of paradise: close to the Myanmar border, modern yet resolutely traditional, spotlessly clean while never sterile; easily navigable but filled with a thousand hidden treasures, urban and chic but surrounded by hills and jungle.

And my god, the food! The moment we stepped off the train from Bangkok you could smell it, that glorious barbecue aroma: the mu ping (pork skewers) you can pick up for three baht on any street, the sai ua (spiced lemongrass sausages) — a Chiang Mai signature dish — you can gobble for 30p. Food was everywhere; everyone was eating — even while driving along on their motorbikes.

It was the Cowgirl who really did it for me: that was when everything about the city came together. There we were, riding past the Chang Phuak Gate not long after arriving, when we saw the queue, and at the end of the queue the cart, and behind the cart the Cowgirl, immaculately made-up beneath a Stetson hat, wielding a cleaver above a mountain of pork, a ridiculous grin on her face. The Cowgirl’s khao kha mu — stewed pork knuckle over rice, served with a boiled egg, raw garlic, pickled mustard greens and chilly vinegar — was a revelation; love at 30 baht, the perfect one-plate meal.

Relatively isolated, its culinary development came without ready access to the coconut milk, palm sugar, and fish sauce that was so prevalent in central and southern Thailand. In their place: herbs, roots and plants from the jungle, filling the spicy Lanna meals — which traditionally used wild game, snakes, frogs and grubs — with sour, bitter and pungent notes.

One of the most famous dishes in this tradition is laab, a punchy, smokey mincemeat, offal and blood salad; another is nam prik ong, a tomato pork dip akin to a ragu — excellent versions of both are made by the sisters of Sorn Chai restaurant. But Chiang Mai, and the love I developed for it, wasn’t only about Lanna food. The Cowgirl’s dish, the khao kha mu, isn’t Lanna after all. Neither is the exceptional fish and chips that Dee (who goes by only one name) serves from the fryer attached to his motorbike (his father ran George’s chippie in Clapham), nor the fine Beast Burger from the gourmet van off Nimmanheamin.

No, it was everything hurled together: a gleeful fusion of climate, landscape and character, the student buzz mixed with the rural pace, the fact that you can get from one side of the city to the other on a bike in 15 minutes. The facts that you can pretty much pick any point on the map go there and eat something outstanding. It was in this way that the barren forecourt of the 7/11 in a nondescript neighbourhood transformed into a food market at night; the way a fried-chicken vendor was open for business at 7 am; how there was no call for a sit-down restaurant with windows and doors because everything wonderful was happening on the streets.

Take Warorot market, take Chiang Mai Gate, take Nimmanheamin on a Friday night, where the back-end of a pick-up truck parks beside a bar and serves grilled oysters and steak. Take the road we lived on near the temple of Wat Chet Yot: come sunset, the staff of one beauty salon set up a gas burner and a mookata grill (a cross between a hot pot and a Korean barbecue) on the pavement and began to drink beer and cook meat for themselves. Across the road, a tailor was doing the same. And you knew — you just knew — that you could join them if you smiled hard and wanted to. A little further up, at the shop where we bought our morning fish-rice porridge, the family were barbecuing together, the young daughter directing her elder brother by means of a piggyback ride. It all seemed to blur together: family, work, play, religion and commerce, on every little alleyway and road, and always, at the heart of it, food. It’s a way of life or rather, life itself.

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