Chosing a Meal at a Thai Restaurant

Thai cuisine is full of fresh and vibrant flavours offering a wonderful meal that is healthy and light, but satisfying to the palate, and made for sociable dining out. There are two styles of eating a main meal in Thailand. You can order a single dish meal for a quick lunch or supper: something like a rice or noodle based dish with meat and vegetables all thrown in; or you can linger over a communal evening meal, where you order a selection of dishes, which are shared between you all and chosen to provide a balance of flavours and textures.

In British Thai restaurants soups are usually served as a starter, to fit in with Western eating habits, but in Thailand a soup is just one of a selection of dishes that you will order as part of your main meal.  In a typical Thai meal, a clear broth soup, Gang Jeude, or a spicy one with coconut milk, Gang Ped, may be served alongside a steamed dish, a stir fried dish, a spicy curry and a grilled meat with a variety of sauces for dipping; each person will have their own serving of rice and will help themselves from the various communal dishes a little at a time.

The number of dishes ordered depends on the number of people eating; as a general rule two people would order three dishes to go with their rice, four people order five dishes and so on, so the greater number of people dining the larger the selection of different dishes.

Most Thai restaurants in Britain offer a variety of set menus, with dishes chosen to balance each other, so that you can experience a traditional Thai meal without too much trouble deciding on how to combine different dishes. Not all dishes in Thai cuisine are spicy; a Thai meal is usually chosen so that a spicy dish is balanced by a more subtle bland one, a fried dish by a steamed one and can often include a salad dressed with a salty spicy dressing of chilies, herbs and fish sauce instead of a spicy curry. Plain grilled meats are served with spicy or sweet chili dipping sauces.

Many meals in Thailand will finish off with some of the wonderful fresh fruit available there; mangos, papaya, melon, grapes, jackfruit and so on, but there are also a variety of desserts based on coconut milk and rice, sweet syrups and egg custards. The rambutan, a tropical fruit related to the lychee, preserved in syrup is a popular dessert.

Most of all a Thai meal should be a wonderful series of tastes, different dishes offering your palate plenty of variety, so that you feel replete and satisfied but not weighed down by your meal.