How to read a menu
How to read a Thai menu
You are standing in front of a menu with no pictures and no English, and someone is waiting. This is about that moment.
What actually makes it difficult
Thai script has no spaces between words, so even a reader who knows the alphabet cannot easily find where one dish name ends and the next begins. Many menus also transliterate inconsistently — the same dish appears as pad kra pao, phat kaphrao and pad krapow.
Eliminate sections before you read dishes
Thai menus are grouped by how the food is cooked, and that grouping does most of the work for you. Ruling out a whole section is faster than reading twenty dish names.
Coconut-based and generally the mildest route in, though the paste carries the heat.
The most controllable section — heat is usually adjustable on request.
The spiciest section by a wide margin, and usually the fishiest.
Mild by default; the sauce is what varies.
Sour and aromatic. Tom yum is hot; tom kha is coconut-softened.
Words worth recognising
Not a phrasebook. Five things that change what you order.
stir-fried
curry
spicy salad — expect heat
not spicy — the single most useful phrase on the page
strict vegetarian, no fish sauce — a much stronger signal than 'vegetarian'
Translation is not interpretation
A translator converts words, which sounds like the job and is not. The output is frequently correct and useless at the same time.
ลาบ
Translated word-for-word: “larb”
A minced-meat salad, served warm or cold, sour and usually very hot. The name tells you nothing about any of that.
What Thai menus don’t print
Nobody is hiding anything. These are foundational ingredients that a Thai kitchen treats the way you treat salt — not an ingredient, a medium. That is exactly why they never appear in a description.
Almost every savoury dish, including ones presented as vegetarian. To a Thai kitchen it is salt, not an ingredient.
Many curry pastes — green and red included — and most som tam.
A great many stir-fries, especially with greens.
Som tam, and several salads and relishes.
Satay obviously, but also som tam, pad thai and as a garnish.
Recipes vary between restaurants and change without notice, so treat all of this as what to raise with the kitchen rather than a guarantee about any particular dish. The staff always have the final word.
TableSage reads menus using an AI language model, which gets things wrong sometimes.
Or photograph it and skip the alphabet.
TableSage reads the menu in front of you and tells you what each dish actually is.