A Food Lover's Guide to Thailand's Four Regions

Thai food is often talked about as one cuisine, but travel a few hundred kilometres in any direction from Bangkok and the menus change. The rice changes, the heat changes, the herbs change, and dishes that are everyday in one region are rare in another.

Thai cooks usually divide the country into four culinary regions: the Central Plains, the North, the Northeast (known as Isaan) and the South. The borders are not sharp, and Bangkok's markets sell food from all of them, but knowing the outline makes a trip far more rewarding.

Central Thailand: rice, coconut and balance

The Central Plains are the country's rice bowl, a flat, wet landscape of paddy fields and rivers around Bangkok and the Chao Phraya. The food here is the version most visitors know already: jasmine rice at every meal, coconut milk curries, and dishes that balance sour, salty, sweet and hot in roughly equal measure.

Central cooking tends to be the sweetest and the most refined of the four, partly because of the long influence of the royal court. It also absorbed a great deal from the Chinese communities of Bangkok, which is where many noodle dishes, stir-fries and dishes such as khao man gai come from.

• Green curry (gaeng keow wan), rich with coconut and fresh green chillies.
• Tom yum and tom kha, the hot and sour soups.
• Pad Thai, the stir-fried noodle dish now served across the world. Thipsamai in Bangkok is one of its best-known addresses.
• Massaman curry, a mild, spiced curry with roots in the Muslim and Persian traders who came to the old capital at Ayutthaya.

Bangkok is the easiest place to eat across the whole country without leaving the city. Or Tor Kor Market, near Chatuchak, is well known for the quality of its produce and prepared food, and is a good place to see ingredients from every region side by side.

The North: mountains, herbs and sticky rice

Northern Thailand, centred on Chiang Mai and the old Lanna kingdom, is cooler and hillier. Sticky rice replaces jasmine rice as the daily staple, eaten by hand from small woven baskets. The cooking uses less coconut and less sugar than the centre, leaning instead on herbs, dried spices, pork and chilli dips eaten with steamed or raw vegetables.

The region's history shows on the plate. Neighbouring Myanmar, the Shan people and Chinese Muslim (Hui) traders who travelled through the hills all left their mark.

• Khao soi, egg noodles in a curried coconut broth, topped with crispy noodles. Khao Soi Mae Sai is one of Chiang Mai's best-known places to try it.
• Sai oua, a coarse pork sausage packed with lemongrass, makrut lime and chilli paste.
• Nam prik noom, a smoky dip of roasted green chillies, and nam prik ong, a mild pork and tomato dip.
• Gaeng hang lay, a slow-cooked pork curry with Burmese roots, flavoured with tamarind, ginger and garlic.
• Khanom jeen nam ngiao, rice noodles in a pork and tomato broth.

The Northeast (Isaan): fermented, fiery and grilled

Isaan is the large plateau that borders Laos and Cambodia. It is the country's most populous region, and its food has spread across Thailand as people from the northeast moved to Bangkok and other cities for work. Many of the grilled chicken, papaya salad and larb stalls in Bangkok are run by Isaan cooks.

Isaan food is direct and bold: very hot, sour and salty, rarely sweet, and almost always eaten with sticky rice. Pla ra, a pungent fermented fish, gives many dishes their depth, and toasted rice powder (khao khua) adds a nutty crunch to meat salads. The cooking shares a great deal with the food of Laos.

• Som tam, green papaya pounded with lime, chilli, fish sauce and peanuts or pla ra.
• Larb moo and nam tok neua, minced or sliced meat salads with lime, chilli, herbs and toasted rice.
• Gai yang, marinated grilled chicken, served with nam jim jaew, a tangy, smoky dipping sauce.
• Tom saep, a hot and sour soup full of herbs.

The South: turmeric, seafood and serious heat

Southern Thailand runs down a long, narrow peninsula between the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand, towards Malaysia. Seafood is everywhere, coconut palms grow along the coast, and fresh turmeric turns many dishes a deep yellow. Southern food has a reputation as the hottest in the country.

The region has large Muslim communities, particularly towards the Malaysian border, and long-standing Chinese communities in towns such as Phuket. Both have shaped its food.

• Kua kling, a dry-fried minced meat with a fierce curry paste and plenty of turmeric.
• Gaeng lueang, a sour, yellow curry made without coconut milk, usually with fish.
• Khao mok gai, a spiced chicken and rice dish closely related to biryani.
• Gai tod Hat Yai, fried chicken from the southern city of Hat Yai, topped with crispy fried shallots.
• Moo hong, Phuket's braised pork belly in black pepper, garlic and soy, from the island's Hokkien Chinese heritage.

Southern meals often come with a big plate of fresh vegetables and herbs to cool the mouth between bites of curry.

Eating across the regions

A few tips help when travelling around:

• Follow the rice. Where people eat sticky rice, expect northern or northeastern food. Where it is jasmine rice, expect central or southern cooking.
• Eat the regional dish in its region. Khao soi in Chiang Mai and southern curries in the south taste different from the versions sold elsewhere.
• Look for regional signs in Bangkok. Shops advertising food from Isaan, the north or the south (often written as the region's name on the sign) tend to cook in that style for people from home.
• Ask for local heat with care. Northeastern and southern food is often very hot, and asking for less chilli is entirely normal.

Seen together, the four regions explain a lot about Thai food: why some meals are eaten with the hands and others with a spoon, why one curry is thick with coconut and another is thin and sour, and why there is no single right way to make most dishes.