guides
Why Menus Don't List the Ingredients That Matter
Fish sauce, dashi, oyster sauce, ghee, anchovy, lard. The ingredients most likely to affect you are the ones a menu has no reason to mention — and it isn't because anyone is hiding them.
The guides
Know what to order
Guides for the moment you are sitting down with a menu you cannot read, or one you can read and still do not trust.
Yelp shipped camera-based menu scanning in late 2025. It's genuinely useful in a narrow set of situations, and three documented limits explain when it won't help you.
Most people read a menu twice and order the thing they always order. Here's a method that gets you to a better answer in about ninety seconds.
Translation gives you a dish's name in English. That is a different thing from knowing what it is, what's in it, or whether you'll like it — and the gap is where dinner goes wrong.
Thai menus look intimidating and mostly aren't. A section-by-section guide to finding something you'll actually enjoy, and the ingredients that catch people out.