Famous Dan Chicken Rice in Chiang Mai Thailand

There are a few chicken rice places in Chiang Mai - not a lot but not hard to find either. Marcus brought us to one of the local favourites.

Look out for this giant size white chicken mascot outside the street side eatery 🐔 It's more than a stall and not really a restaurant either - a uniquely Asian experience.

There's a kitchen and some seats under a zinc roofed shed. (That 🐔 mascot is too cute - is that you Dan, you poor thing? 😂)

Then across a gravel path, there under a big tree and behind some bushes is a garden type al fresco area. So nice!

Everyone was busy when we arrived near closing time. The internal organs (of the chicken lah!) were sold out by this time.

Our initial order, three bowls of rice and chicken, came to around SGD5 in total. We later got an additional serving of chicken and rice because we couldn't help ourselves (actually it was just Marcus 🤭).

The chicken came deboned and undressed, I mean without dressing i.e. no sauce. This was neither Singapore style which is served with sauce, sometimes half submerged in it, nor the Hainanese way which is undressed but never deboned. So undressed and deboned, the Thai way.

The chicken meat was tender, succulent, moist but neither soft nor juicy. There's a subtle natural chicky sweetness, especially in the tender squeaky chewy skin.

There's no juicy jelly fat between the skin and meat as the poached bird did not undergo the cold ~~turkey~~ water treatment (as in the Singapore and Cantonese style). The poached bird was air cooled, the Hainanese way.

The bones stripped from the birds were thrown into a big pot to churn and boil. Some of the resulting stock is used to boil rice.

The rice was great. Tenderly nutty, lightly greased, aromatic, rich with savoury flavour from boiling in real chicken stock and aromatics such as lemongrass.

Some of the real chicken stock was served as complimentary soup. It was simply good for the soul as it was more or less pure chicken soup.

The robust savoury salty spicy dipping sauce was uniquely Thai. It's a blend of lime, galangal, fish sauce, tau cheo (fermented soy bean sauce), etc. Chicken rice was brought to Thailand by Hainanese and the taucheo in the sauce is a nod to the Teochews which is the largest Chinese language community in Thailand.