Hot Spot

TASTEFUL LANGUAGE I’m wracking my brain for culinary superlatives as the moon-faced restaurateur eggs me on, plying me with cold beer. Mouthwatering? Lip-smacking? Succulent? Scrumptious? “Yes, yes,” says Chai Uan-kum, proprietor of Chai Chuan Chin, scribbling furiously. “Very good.” His is the newest establishment on Manting Lu Road, Jinghong’s premier eat street, and I’ve been enlisted to help draft a sign in English that will lure peckish Westerners.

Chai’s place serves up top-notch Dai fooddishes like beef fried with lemongrass, crispy dried sheets of riverweed and grilled snakehead fish with tamarindas well as all the Thai standards. And if you’re game, he’ll pour you a generous measure of snake wine from a vat stuffed with coiled serpents and regale you with tales of his adventures.

When the Red Guards ran riot in 1966, Chai’s parents, like thousands of Xishuangbanna’s Dai tribespeople, packed up what they could carry, along with their five children, and set off on foot. They made it past the border, trudged bandit-infested goat tracks through Burma, and didn’t stop until they reached the Thai border town of Mae Sai. “Growing up in Thailand, I was fascinated by my parents’ stories of home,” says Chai, 37. “So when I was 17, I came back.” He found work as a goldsmith, obtained a Chinese ID card, and last March opened Chai Chuan Chinfulfilling a lifelong dream.

Xishuangbanna is seen as a kind of backyard Thailand by the Chinese, with 2.5 million mainlanders visiting last year to marvel at its tropical lushness and vibrant minorities. “A lot of Thais are coming now too, many to revisit their Dai roots,” says Chai.

Palm-lined Manting Lu Road, near the Mekong in the heart of Jinghong, is a magnet for the hungry. Other standouts among its dozens of eateries are the Mei Mei and Forest cafes, backpackers’ havens both. But for authentic eats, head for Chai’s place. He gets all the superlatives.