Thai food is not one cuisine — central, northern, northeastern and southern styles are dramatically different.
The baseline most visitors know — jasmine rice, clear curries, stir-fries, balanced sweet-sour-salty-spicy; milder than the other regions.
Sticky rice eaten by hand, khao soi (curry noodles), sai ua (herbal sausage), nam prik ong (pork and tomato dip) — more Burmese and Yunnan Chinese influence.
Sticky rice, larb, som tum, gai yang, pla ra (fermented fish) — the most popular cuisine nationally but also the spiciest and most pungent.
The fiercest cuisine — curries use fresh turmeric and dried spices; gaeng tai pla (fish stomach curry) is funky and extreme; massaman curry is a mild outlier.
