What to order
What to order at a Thai restaurant as a picky eater
Thai food has a reputation that puts people off before they have read a menu. Some of that reputation is earned, and most of it applies to a section you can simply skip.
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.
Reliable starting points
Wide rice noodles in soy — almost never spicy, and texturally straightforward.
The mildest curry on most menus. Closer to a spiced stew than a hot curry.
Grilled, familiar, and the peanut sauce arrives on the side rather than on the dish.
Endlessly adjustable and rarely surprising.
If you want to stretch slightly
Holy basil stir-fryผัดกะเพรา (pad kra pao)
Peppery rather than chilli-hot in many kitchens, and one of the most-ordered dishes in Thailand. Ask for it mai phet — not spicy — and it becomes very approachable.
A dish that shares most of its properties with something you already enjoy, and differs in one, lands far more often than a leap does.
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.
Point it at the menu instead.
TableSage reads every dish on a Thai menu — including the parts that aren't printed — and tells you which ones suit you.