Chiang Mai Kitchen
Some of the best Thai food in Oxford, hidden in a crooked timbered building down a narrow passage off the High Street.
Some of the best Thai food in Oxford, hidden in a crooked timbered building down a narrow passage off the High Street.
We've been eating here for years, and the entrance still catches us out. You slip off the High Street into a narrow covered passage beside Kemp Hall, one of Oxford's oldest surviving timber-framed buildings, and the noise of the city drops away. Up a short flight of stairs there's a low-beamed room that feels closer to a country inn than a city restaurant, and it's here that Chiang Mai Kitchen has been quietly serving some of the most honest Thai food in Oxford since the early 1990s. It is the sort of address locals pass between each other rather than shout about, and after one visit you understand why.
What keeps us coming back is that nothing about it feels like a generic high-street takeaway. Everything is cooked fresh to order, so the kitchen takes its time and the flavours arrive properly built rather than rushed. The menu leans towards northern Thai cooking, which means plenty of aromatic curries, fragrant soups scented with galangal and lemongrass, and the kind of stir-fries that carry real heat when you ask for it. The room is small and candlelit, all dark timber and low ceilings, which makes it feel like a genuine find on a winter evening. It fills up fast, so we'd always ring ahead, especially at the weekend or in term time when the colleges are busy.
Oxford is not short of places to eat, but a lot of them are either chain restaurants or student-priced and forgettable. Chiang Mai Kitchen is neither. It is a proper independent with decades behind it, run by people who clearly care about the cooking, and the value is fair for a city where fair value can be hard to find. When friends stay at the cottage and ask where to eat after a day in Oxford, this is the name that comes out first. A few things we'd flag before you go:
We tend to end up here at the close of a full day in the city rather than as a trip in its own right. The passage sits right in the heart of things, a couple of minutes from the covered market and an easy stroll from the colleges, so it slots neatly onto the end of an afternoon of wandering. A typical day for us runs museums and browsing first, dinner here second. If you have the children with you, the Pitt Rivers Museum and its shrunken heads and totem poles will buy you a good hour, and the neighbouring Ashmolean Museum is one of the finest free collections in the country. Add a poke around the stalls of Oxford's covered market and you have earned your dinner. For the bigger picture of a day out in the city, our guide to Oxford pulls it all together.
Oxford is about thirty-five to forty minutes from Well Cottage by car, dropping down through the villages and onto the A44 or the A34. In the evening there is usually parking on the streets around the High Street, though the city's park and ride sites are the stress-free option earlier in the day. If you would rather leave the car behind, the bus from Chipping Norton runs straight into the centre, which makes a shared bottle of wine with dinner a much easier decision. For more ideas on where to eat across the area, browse our full guide to eating and drinking.
“Easily the most reliable Thai in Oxford. We've been coming for years and it never disappoints.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.