When looking for authentic Thai food go, if possible, with restaurants that have these logos. Thai Select Premium indicates at least an 85% authenticity in the menu with traditional decor.
The Thai Select logo indicates 75%-84% authenticity and as the case with Premium Select is awarded by the Thai government to restaurants outside the kingdom.
A restaurant with either of these logos will ensure recipes and ingredients are authentic and that the chef will normally be Thai. There is an exception if the chef is non-Thai then he must have a Thai Cuisine Training Certificate from an approved academy.
The Thai Select program is headed by the Department of International Trade Promotion, Ministry of Commerce, the Royal Thai Government to certify and promote authentic Thai cuisine around the globe. It appears to be a fairly new program so I would not expect to see this at your favorite mom & pop Thai restaurant (yet).
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Dine well my friends and amigos mios.
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With you to guide us…por supuesto.
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Wish I’d known this while living in NYC. We ate out at Thai restaurants quite often.
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I just found out about it myself and figured it was not widely known. This seems like a pretty smart idea to preserve the authenticity of Thai food internationally. I admit to dining in some ‘Thai’ restaurants that, although the names were the same, did not remind me of any dishes that I had ever tried in Thailand.
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A lot of U.S. restaurateurs do Asian poorly, particularly Chinese and Thai. They do get sashimi and tamago right but that’s hard to get wrong!
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A lot of U.S. restaurateurs do Asian poorly, particularly Chinese and Thai.
It is amazing isn’t it how they can get it so wrong by accident? I thought chop suey was chop suey until I visited Hong Kong (under British rule).
Speaking of which the Susie Wong district rocked my world where in addition to the standard debauchery, I tried to pick a fight with a Russian naval infantryman. He refused the invitation.
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They don’t purposefully get it wrong; it’s what the customer responds to : bland and no spices.
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Amazing, what passes for ‘Asian’ cuisine here…dishes fried within an inch of edible, salty beyond belief, and drowning in sauce. You couldn’t eat these items with chopsticks – even if you could actually manipulate them. Give me fresh, seasoned – not sauced – simple dishes any day. Your pics have made me picky, ST.
(Does the Hong Kong story mean you’re writing?)
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