Northern Thai Style Fresh and full of flavor, the cuisine has ancient links with Myanmar By JESSICA MUDDITT / YANGON
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“
s the youngest of six children, the kitchen was my playground,” said the owner of Yangon’s Nacha Thai Restaurant, Panida Ponlabute, who goes by the nickname “Air” (which incidentally means “littlest one” in Thai).
For 30 years, Air’s mother ran an ever-expanding restaurant in Chiang Mai and Air asserts that Nacha’s dishes are as authentic as any to be found in the northern provinces of Thailand.
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That’s because her mother, an excellent cook, trained the restaurant’s three Thai chefs (who also hail from Chiang Mai and are culinary school graduates) as well as passing on her recipes to them. Nacha has also trained up two Myanmar chefs. Many of the spices used to create the curry pastes are sourced from markets in Chiang Mai, despite the fact that most are available locally. “The spices I’ve bought in Yangon taste different from home. I don’t know why—perhaps it’s the soil or the climate,” Air said.
Nacha opened almost exactly three years ago and initially served up European fare in addition to Thai and Myanmar classics. However eight months later, Air decided that Nacha should change course. It began specializing in Thai food (as well as retaining some Myanmar dishes) because the cost of ingredients for Western food was high and some items were difficult to source. Furthermore, Air said that the number of high-quality European restaurants in Yangon made competition intense, whereas Nacha remains only one of two restaurants offering northern Thai cuisine (Sabai Sabai is the other) in the former capital. This may in part be the reason why Nacha’s northern Thai set menu is more popular than the central Thai set menu (both are priced at 29,000 kyat and easily feed two people). For those who prefer to sample all three cuisines, it’s possible to order individual dishes from Nacha’s September 2014