Thai food is becoming ever more popular thanks to its colourful flavours, diversity and healthy ingredients. The Thai kitchen is famous for its creative use of spices, for allowing guests the chance to customise their choice of dishes, and for the smile always attached to the kind service. We explored Budapest for the best places to best dip our chopsticks into a bowl of authentic Thai food.
For those who have already tried the original and those who have not, it is highly recommended to start your Thai adventure in the capital at one of the Thai Select restaurants certified by the Kingdom of Thailand. This guarantees quality, use of original ingredients, authentic recipes, Thai chefs and that famous renowned hospitality. Four restaurants in Budapest have earned this award: Bangkok, Tom Yum, Parázs and Green Thai.
Traditional Thai cuisine is exciting and can vary between the four regions of the country, so typical local dishes are also prepared in a myriad of variations. The most authentic recipes are listed in central Thailand, where the influences of neighbouring cuisines are less pronounced.
Preservation of tradition is extremely important here, an important part of which is gastronomy: beyond food, it extends to a love of life. Sit around a table crowded with fragrant, colourful dishes and share the delicacies as part of your meal.
The best-rated Thai restaurants in Budapest convincingly deliver on that, with a quality that meets every expectation. At Tom Yum’s restaurants, you can choose from 70 Thai specialities in more than 300 variations: soups, salads, appetisers, curries, pastas, wok dishes, fish and desserts.
Original Thai flavours
“Our main goal is to acquaint the Hungarian public and foreigners with original Thai flavours, and we have the help of our chefs from Thailand,” says the Tom Yum founder.
In their restaurant on Andrássy út, in addition to the spacious, homely yet exotically furnished spaces on the ground and first floors, you can also enjoy your favourites on the terrace in good weather, as locals in Thailand do. “In Thailand, it is not typical for people to have a large kitchen at home, because there are back-to-back restaurants and canteens which are also open at night. Dining is combined with the hustle and bustle of the street, which is the kind of thing we would like to create.”
At Thai Select restaurants, the gastronomic creations are all made from fresh vegetables and fresh meat in rapid time, with plenty of ingredients – more than 20, for example, in a basic padthai. In the wok, a soup has only five minutes over the flame, so it is guaranteed that the vegetables retain their mineral and vitamin content, and that the food is served super fresh. Many herbs are used that have a good effect on the human body such as Thai lemongrass, galanga, ginger, kaffir lime leaf, cardamom, star anise and coriander.
From the wide selection of traditional soups, Thai noodles and rice dishes, it’s not easy to choose – fortunately at Tom Yum, the menu comes with pictures and useful information and, of course, staff are happy to answers to any questions you might have. The restaurant is an avid user of vegetables, and you can ask for 80 percent of the dishes in vegan versions.
The ginger rice dish is a perfect match for cooler weather and is so invigorating you may be forced to return for the brilliant mango rice dessert. Alongside the main course, you can choose a typical Thai drink, coconut milk topped over iced tea, complete with a South-East Asian lunch.
Your Thai adventure in the capital will be such an intense and special experience, and easy on a European stomach, all these four restaurants with the Thai Select label really are colourful locations on the gastronomic map of Budapest!
