on our last day at wat don chan we had a party for the kids--we asked them what they would like to eat and they suprisingly chose pizza, because none of them had ever tried it. pizza is really expensive in chiang mai, really expensive and for the most part really crappy.... thai people don't generally eat dairy in a savory context. they don't use cheese at all, and their milk products are invariably tooth-achingly sweet. last time we were in thailand it was really difficult to even find pizza with real mozarella and not the creamy-processed laughing cow stuff. in the last few years there's been a pizza renaissance. not only are there a plethora of italian-run places where you can get everything from gnocci with sage brown butter to carpaccio or pizza and calzones, there's also this new chain called "the pizza company" where you can enjoy salad bar and shrimp hotdog crabstick pizza. and they're always blaring gangsta, dancehall, or dirty south in these restaurants for some reason. even though pizza seems to be "the trend of today", we weren't sure our kids would like it, so we decided to bring some pizza for them to try and then some good thai food that everyone could enjoy. so we ordered som tam, (green papaya salad), and fried chicken and sticky-rice, a popular traditional issan specialty, from our favorite homestyle thai restaurant karanjana, (otherwise known as "little dog", owing to the owner's amazing little dog--see dog review#3). the lady who runs karanjana is awesome. we love her. she threw in 2 free bags of oranges for the kids and some special "jai", (vegetarian), som tam for me. the pizza was predictably crappy, but thai people are nothing if not polite, so the kids ate it along with issan food. then they sang songs about how sad it was to part, but that we would meet again someday.
it was really the best pizza party ever.