Sticky Rice: Northern Thai Cuisine

Last night I went to Sticky Rice (www.stickyricethai.com) with some friends. One of the friends lived in Thailand for three years while working on her master’s degree, and she had heard that Sticky Rice has the most authentic Northern Thai cuisine in the city. As we perused the menu, she got really excited, because, indeed, the food is exactly what she ate at the night markets in Chiang Mai, the capital of the northern Thai provinces. The rest of us decided to let our friend choose the dishes that she thought would be the best introduction to authentic northern Thai.

Most of our food was ordered from the appetizer menu. We got an omelet with ant eggs, a mussel fritter, fish cakes, raw papaya salad, beef salad, dried catfish salad, chicken curry with rice noodles (the most Americanized dish we got), and, because we were feeling brave, fried bamboo caterpillars. The caterpillars really didn’t have much flavor. They were just crunchy and salty, like chewy popcorn.

Northern Thai cuisine is served with little containers of sticky rice. You’re supposed to take the rice in your fingers and use it to pick up the food, but I had to use the spoon and fork, too, because I didn’t want to miss a drop of the flavorful sauces that came with everything. All of the dishes we got were excellent and extremely spicy. I can handle a lot of spice, but the raw papaya salad was almost too much to take; it really burned and made my nose run, but once the endorphins kicked in, I was fine. My favorite dish was the dried catfish salad. It had just the right balance of hot, savory, and sour.

Finally, for dessert we got two servings of sweet sticky rice, one with mango and the other with a fruit called demian. The rice also has coconut milk in it. Both were good, but the mango was the favorite by far.

Sticky Rice is a BYOB place, so we brought beers that we got at Drinks over Dearborn. The staff at Drinks over Dearborn is amazing; we told them we were going for spicy Thai food, and they immediately came up with several good recommendations. We ended up with ginger beer and some red rice ale. The red rice ale in particular was good with the super-spicy food.

That dinner at Sticky Rice was one of the best meals of my entire life. It was perfect, from beginning to end. And the final bill was just $20 per person (including tip). I can’t recommend it enough.