Thai food is delicious and should, by all means, by thoroughly enjoyed. Don’t commit a faux pas at the table though. Read below for 10 helpful tips on Thai food etiquette.
- Thai food is typically enjoyed with a fork and spoon. Rice is scooped with your spoon and aided with the fork. Chopsticks are not used to eat rice or dry noodle dishes, such as Pad Thai or Pad Si-ew. Chopsticks are usually only used to consume noodles in soup.
- Thai food is often enjoyed communal style, with shared dishes in the middle of the table.
Wait until everyone has his or her individual plate of rice before starting to eat.
- Scoop food from the shared dishes on top of your rice and scoop it up with a spoon for a bite. Use a fork to arrange a proper amount of food onto the spoon before putting it to your mouth
- The spoon is the main utensil used for eating Thai food. Westerners only use a spoon to eat soup and forks to eat rice; however, the latter isn’t efficient when eating rice or noodles with a sauce, such as curry. If you use a fork to scoop curry and rice, the rice will fall off.
- Scoop rice and curries with small and perfect bites. It’s only polite to not take huge mouthfuls, no matter how delicious the food is!
- Eat soup by putting some into individual small bowls. If you are the first to start on the soup, serve some to everyone on the table first.
- Don’t eat loudly. Don’t slurp to show that the food is delicious, like the Chinese or Japanese. Thais eat quietly.
- If there is an inedible part in a dish, such as a shrimp’s head in the soup, take it out of your mouth with a spoon and put it aside. Sometimes there will be a specific bowl designated for the “trash” on the table.
- When you are done eating, neatly nestle your spoon and fork together on your plate.
- If you use chopsticks to eat rice from a bowl in the Thai-Chinese style, don’t stick the chopsticks directly into the rice. It looks like an incense offering made to the deceased, so it is not considered to be polite.
Follow these simple steps and eat Thai food like a PRO while enjoying the different flavours of Thai cuisine!
For more blogs on Thai Etiquette and Do’s and Dont’s you can refer to the following links:
2. Quick Tips: 5 Do’s and Dont’s in Thailand
3. Temple Etiquette in Thailand