Raan Larb Pa Than specializes in laab flavoured with dashes of beef bile

Well, Huen Jai Yong comes close. Located in an old Lanna-style wooden house, the restaurant specializes in the kind of homey, casual cooking you would find on any northerner’s table. Unlike its Isan counterpart, the gaeng om stew here is redolent of makwan, a local spice as tongue-numbing as Sichuan peppercorn. A serving of thum makuea, or mashed baby eggplants, manages to be mild and almost buttery under a generous lashing of crispy shallots, chopped coriander, and pork crackling. every dish is a tightrope walk between salty and spicy, with slight nods to bitter and tart in between. Everyone at my table pronounces the food especially good.

A vegetarian stir-fry at Raan Jay Yai

Even so, it’s not my Aunt Priew’s cooking. This formidable lady—technically my first cousin once removed—was born nine days before my father in the house next door to his, on the very same patch of land in downtown Chiang Rai where I, too, was born. To get a real taste of home, that is where I would have to go.

The northernmost city in Thailand is often dismissed as Chiang Mai’s dowdy older sister, a quiet backwater of 200,000 inhabitants where good restaurants and watering holes are few and far between. I suppose it has been thus ever since King Mengrai ditched the city as his capital and moved his court to Chiang Mai (literally, “new city”) in 1296. But that doesn’t keep Chiang Rai’ers from nursing a secret superiority complex when it comes to their food. “How was Chiang Mai?” Aunt Priew asks me when she picks me up at the airport, before offering her own opinion of the cooking there: completely adulterated, made sweeter and milder to conform to central Thai and western palates. “Balum,” she sniffs, using a northern word for something that is “not delicious.”