Best Restaurants Chiang Mai: Hot Chili Thai

Thai Food in Chiang Mai

Hot Chilli Bar & Restaurant

Best Restaurants Chiang Mai

Hot Chilli Thai is one of the Best Restaurants Chiang Mai. This popular establishment seems to be always busy.

Its not hard to find Thai Food in Chiang Mai, but when you eat at Hot Chilli’s you realize that atmosphere is as important as the food. The food was very good, but expensive for Chiang Mai. Sometimes you want to splurge, and this was that day! What you pay for at Hot Chilli is a well designed. You see a beautiful restaurant, nice china, good service, great location inside the Old City. More importantly, the food is fresh and is full of great flavors, because it’s seasoning well. This is what you expect from Thai food, but it’s not street food, it’s really fine dining. Watch out, it’s good watch the heat or spice level if the food says its spicy.

The Pros

Good fresh food, spicy with a good amount of herbs, big menu, beautifully decorated, good service, nice china plates and food is styled on the plate. The food is very tasty, generous and displayed well on the dish or their special way they serve (see the picture of rice and shrimp served in 1/2 pineapple). 

The Cons

Expensive

Hot Chilli Restaurant is very pricy especially for Chiang Mai. Generally Thai food is very cheap. It’s always more expensive in a restaurant then it is with street Thai food.

Very Spicy

Tourists that come to Chiang Mai generally are not hot spicy eaters in general. It takes a while to get used to more heat, and many travelers are in Thailand for short periods of time, like a week or two. It takes a while to build a tolerance for hot chilis. If you don’t like spicy food, please ask the service personal not make your food spicy. For expats that live in Chiang Mai, those people are probably used to hot spicy food, but I would not expect to see many expats eat at Hot Chilli’s, unless they are entertaining visitors.

Deceiving Menu

They have photos of the dishes on the menu but the photos are not next to the listing of the food and its difficult to match up a particular dish with the price. Not all items are confusing but some are. 

One item I ordered the price and listing were not together. I find this deceiving, but I don’t believe it was on purpose. But with that said, its expensive to eat at this restaurant and nobody likes surprises after a meal. I don’t know how much this item really costs, except the bill was higher than it should have been. This is why I noticed the discrepancy on the menu vs. prices.

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