Thailand can easily be named ‘Heaven of gastronomic pleasure’ where the restaurants, the open-air markets, the street food stalls are all geared up to tantalize your taste buds. With a mouth-watering variety of food available almost everywhere, every bit of Thailand is worth exploring.

Most Thai restaurants can be categorized into: stand-alone restaurants and store-front restaurants.
The "stand-alone" restaurants are more professionally managed as opposed to the store-front kind. The store-front variety, often family-run, are typically found as part of a group of store-fronts and just happen to be serving food. Usually they have some sort of food display out front so you can see how fresh things are and select seafood to be cooked. They may be noodle shops – where noodles are displayed along with the type of meat that goes in the noodles.

Street food is alive and flourishing in Thailand. The lanes of Thailand are vibrant with smell and temptation of variety food throughout day and night – ranging from fresh fruits (mangoes, Thai oranges, longan, apples from Washington, strawberries, durian, rambutan, mangosteen) to coconut rice pancakes (kanom krok), from lip-smacking trays of curries, basil pork and Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce to array of prepared to order noodles.
The night markets display streets lined up with vendors ready with their cuisine carts
In areas where tourists reside there is less street food but usually you need only to walk a little towards a residential street and there it is again.

Then there are the "hawkers" – vendors carrying their wares in two baskets suspended on a bamboo pole.

The western fast-food outlets have also joined the league, catering to the food freaks in Thailand. The most renowned being McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken (300 outlets nationwide) and Dunkin' Doughnuts with Swenson's, Baskin &Robbins, Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen and others beginning to appear in greater numbers.

Thai Restaurant Chains

S&P has been around since 1973 and now has over 150 restaurants and bakery shops in supermarkets, office buildings. Snack items and frozen meals are also available here. Although they serve mostly Thai foods, Chinese and Japanese dishes are also on the menu; one of their trademarks being the display of western-style desserts such as frosted cakes, cookies, sundaes and ice cream.

Yet another chain is Kruathai – meaning "Thai Kitchen." As with S&P, the menus are in both Thai and English with photographs of most dishes, a bit Thai-oriented. All the desserts here are Thai – preparations worth mentioning are pandanus, sago and cantaloupe in coconut, dried taro jam in coconut, and water chestnut ruby in coconut milk.

The Black Canyon coffee chain is an upcoming name in Thai food-chain legacy. The outlets serve Western foods along with Thai cuisine.

Thai Food Centres

Thai food centres are the ideal for authentic Thai fast-food. Normally, they are found at the top floor of a departmental store or somewhere in a high-rise catering to businesses. These centers are essentially street food stalls brought under one roof.

Apart from these, Thailand has several restaurants matching the needs of those craving for a blend of comfort, ambience and good food to be enjoyed in leisure. A brief description of where to eat in locations like Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Krabi and Pattaya are as follows: