What Thai dishes do you recommend?

In my town a new restaurant has just opened - serving Thai food. :sunglasses:

I quite like curries (not too hot :wink:) and the sort of Indonesian food you can get in the Netherlands.
Actually I just enjoy food! :face_with_monocle:

So what dishes do you like?

Here’s the menu:

Menu|Thai’d Up-53 High St, Oakham

If it was me, I would order the Thai Duck Leg or Lamb Massaman Curry, assuming the curry wasn’t too hot. If you ask them they will say the curry isn’t that hot, but remember they may have been raised on food with lots of curry and if it’s mixed in with the lamb there’s not much you can do about it at that point.

My favorite isn’t listed in their menu. The “Vegetable Spring Rolls” might be close depending on how they are made.

Thai food is great and it sounds like you’ll enjoy it. I’m quite envious that you’re getting to discover a new cuisine.

One proviso to that - Thai food does go big on chilli and heat so you might want to check with your waiter about spice levels. That said, let’s go for some classic dishes:

Starter - Chicken Satay or Tom Yum soup (likely to be hot though)
Main - Red or Green curry are mainstays, both delicious - Red is slightly milder. Pad Thai is another absolute classic and not spice led. If you go for curry I would suggest sticky or jasmine rice.

From that menu though, I doubt you can go too far wrong.

I can’t see the menu, but if you like some spice I’m a big fan of Drunken Noodles.

My go-to is cashew stir fry with beef. It’s odd that they don’t offer it for the cashew one when it’s available for the others. For curry I’d go for Paneang. It’s strange to see Singapore noodles at a Thai place, they are normally seen at Chinese takeaways.

I’m a fan of Pad Thai. Also, Butter Chicken, but it doesn’t seem to be on the menu. Costs nothing to ask if they can make it “off menu”.

Enjoy!

That’s an Indian dish.

I firmly believe that a good red Thai curry is like the Arc of the Covenant - Proof of a kind and loving god, who will melt you face off.

My absolute favorite is the Drunken Noodles (“Street Noodles” on this menu, Pad Kee Mao elsewhere) — it’s way more flavorful and interesting than Pad Thai. Not that Pad Thai is bad, it’s just a far simpler dish.

It’s also worth trying all the curries if you visit more than once… they’re each different and good in their own ways.

For a simpler but sill-tasty dish, the Chicken Katsu might be interesting too. That’s traditionally a Japanese dish (fried chicken on rice), but I bet their Thai interpretation of it will be interesting too.

It’s really hard to go wrong with Thai food, except, yeah, watch the spiciness if you’re not used to it (and ask for no heat or very low heat).

In the mid-nineties I moved to Washington State from North Carolina, and some friends took me to a Thai restaurant. Not knowing what to order, I got green curry.

Hot damn. That was a pivotal moment in my life.

Since then I’ve been chasing that high, and I order green curry every chance I get. It’s rarely as delicious as it was on that first night, but when it’s good, it’s one of the best foods on earth.

I get it with tofu, because the protein isn’t the emphasis, it’s the sauce that you should be focused on, and chicken’s wasted in a green curry.

Punnish restaurant name: :check_mark:

The very first item may be good for the variety to share plus each person picks a somewhat different dish as “theirs” but completely shared. You may indeed have leftovers.

One of the currys may be good to try. Red is usually among the hotter ones, yellow is milder, massamun is mild to medium, and green may be an “ask the staff” situation but I doubt it’s extremely hot. Most western Thai places tend to tone it down unless you request it.

Pad thai is the stereotypical dish, not my favorite but some people love it. Drunken noodles is a good choice (no alcohol involved unless you order it). The cheap Thai restaurant beer at least in the US is Singha, which is nothing special but I think among the better Asian restaurant beers.

Then it’s a Thai interpretation of a Japanese interpretation of a French dish (côtelette).

If it’s a new Thai restaurant that seems like it’d be a convenient frequent lunch spot, I’ll first order the Pad Thai to get my bearings. If it’s a place that I enjoy, or will be a one-stop (maybe it’s on the other side of town, I’m visiting a new city, etc.) I usually get the green curry - it’s my favorite Thai dish, bar none.

I will sometimes rotate in a masaman (especially if the weather is cold/dreary - it’s a great comfort dish), or a panang (I like this dish spicier than normal, and I find myself ordering it more during the warmer seasons).

Reminds me of a Chinese restaurant that used to be in Shirley, a suburb of Birmingham (England), called The Shirley Temple.

I always order Pad Thai when I try a new Thai restaurant for the first time. I have a certain way I like Pad Thai, and I don’t like it too sweet, which is the way lot of places seem to make it. Not that it’s necessarily a deal breaker if I don’t like their Pad Thai; I just like Pad Thai and mentally note which Thai places do it the way I like it. Our current go-to Thai place does not do Pad Thai the way I like it, but everything else is very good.

Next would be a red curry, ordered ‘Thai spicy’. Most Thai restaurants, even if they warn you it’s going to be spicy, hold back on the spice. Our go-to Thai place is serious about the spice, to the point I often wimp out and order my red curry ‘medium plus’ (I still like spice, but my digestive system doesn’t like it as much as it used to).

Another Thai dish I often get is Holy Basil stir fry (which goes by various spellings / versions of Pad Kra Pao). If I’m feeling like beef for my protein I usually will get this, since I think it goes best with beef, whereas with red curries I like to stick with chicken or seafood.

Personally, I’d have the Chicken Satay to start followed by the Spicy Thai Basil Fried Rice, with instructions to not “white spice” me.

Most of the Thai dishes I’d recommend, I don’t see on there. They do have Pad Kee Mao at least, and I’d second the recommendation of that over Pad Thai.

My kids love Pad Thai, and I like it enough to eat a few bites of theirs, but not enough to order it. Good Pad Thai, for me, is intensely aromatic, lots of lime and fish sauce and peanuts and maybe dried shrimp I’m not sure. Bad Pad tie is just sweetened noodles.

Cool, I had no idea! The Roots of Tonkatsu: A Delicious Fusion of East and West

Soooo much goes into it… the sauce, the spices, the texture of the noodles, the doneness of the protein, the garnish… a good pad thai can be a magnificent thing of beauty. But it’s also hard to find excellent pad thai like that; most are mediocre (especially in generic strip mall Thai places where they just oversweeten it for Western palates), and it’s doubly hard to know upfront whether a particular new restaurant will do it well.

Meanwhile, the other dishes (curries and drunken noodles etc.) can at least better mask mediocrity with layered complexity, i.e., they’re designed to be such an explosion of flavor that it’s harder to mess them up. Pad thai, by contrast, is that rare refined elegance that requires a delicate balance of nuances.

The paneang and masaman curries will probably not be as spicy as the red and green curries, and both are classic Thai dishes.

Pad Thai and street noodles (drunken noodles) are both classic Thai dishes. Drunken noodles (which I like more) are traditionally very spicy. The name comes from the idea that you have to drink a lot of beer with it to cool things off. My guess is that this restaurant’s drunken noodles aren’t all that spicy (though you could ask). A lot of restaurants will ask how spicy you want things (something that’s easier to control with noodle dishes than with curries, because the curry sauces are made in advance).

Singapore noodles aren’t Thai. Where I live, I’ve seen them at Chinese restaurants, but not at Thai restaurants.

The spicy Thai basil fried rice looks good. Thai basil is one of the herbs used in Thai cooking. Whether it’s too spicy for you is something you’ll have to judge for yourself. Again, the restaurant may let you specify.

Tom yum is another classic Thai dish. It’s a hot and sour soup that’s common in Thailand, and their version has a lot of typical Thai herbs, like lemongrass, galangal, and lime leaves.

Have fun!