Restaurants

Thai cuisine is famous all over the world for its variety, flavor and expert use of spices. Depending on who is cooking and for whom the food is being made, it varies between spicy hot to bland. This makes the Thai dishes popular among the international population.

Initially, Thai dishes concentrated on marine creatures and on the use of herbs and plants. Big cuts of meat were a no-no in the dishes. Over the years due to demand of diners, dishes are made with large chunks of meat. Thais avoid large cuts of big animals due to their Buddhist culture. Big chunks are shredded and spiced up with herbs. Thais normally cook their food by grilling, stewing or baking. With the advent of Chinese, they learnt the art of frying, deep-frying and stir-frying. The different invaders who came to Thailand like the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and the Japanese influenced their cooking styles and this resulted in a wide variety of Thai dishes. For example, chili was inducted into Thai dishes by the Portuguese.

The Thais are famous for adapting other cuisines to suit them by replacing the ingredients. In the Indian dishes, they replaced ghee with coconut oil, coconut milk with other dairy products, toned down the spices and added more herbs like galangal and lemon grass. Whereas in other cuisines, hot spicy dishes burn the tongue for longer duration, Thai dishes burn for short spell only. Thai meal is served all in a go unlike other cuisines. This lets the diner try out different combinations of tastes.

Restaurants in Pattaya

Pattaya , being a popular tourist destination has a vast collection of all kinds of restaurants spread all over the city. Though there are multi-cuisine and other cuisine restaurants, most of them serve only Thai cuisine, with the servers not fluent in English. For English-speaking staff, hotel restaurants are a safe bet. Some of the restaurants in the hotel premises are very popular with in-house guests as well as outside diners. However, one drawback of the hotel restaurants is that they are more expensive. In Thai cuisine, while some dishes are very spicy others are bland. The red and green pepper, known as chilies, adds spice to the dishes. If you want to avoid spicy dishes, better learn ‘Mai Phet’, which means ‘Not spicy’. Some restaurants take care to serve the milder versions of the dishes to visitors, even though not mentioned.