About the neighborhood
Chiang Mai's authentic residential quarter and street-food heart
Santitham is the part of Chiang Mai where Chiang Mai locals actually live. It sits just north of the old city walls, a 10-minute walk from the moat and a 5-minute walk from Nimmanhaemin's polished bars — but feels worlds away from both. The streets are narrow, the architecture is unremarkable, the cafés are simple, and the food is some of the best in northern Thailand. Santitham is famous among locals for its concentration of small khao soi restaurants (the Burmese-influenced curry noodle soup that is Chiang Mai's signature dish), its evening street food carts, its cheap northern Thai breakfasts, and the kind of family-run noodle shops that have been in the same hands for three generations. There is almost no English on the menus and almost no other tourists. For travellers willing to skip the polished version of Chiang Mai, Santitham is where the real city happens: slow, residential, deeply lived-in.
Encyclopedic content adapted from the Wikipedia article on Santitham, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
