Thai Food Already Has a Mark

Someone asked this week why sushi has a standard and Thai food doesn’t. Fair question. The pages clipped under it were not a sushi code. They were Singapore’s rules for keeping rats and cockroaches out of a kitchen, updated in 2019. Every kitchen should follow those. They don’t tell you how to cook a curry.

Thai food already has a mark. It’s called Thai SELECT, and it comes from Thailand’s Ministry of Commerce. I read the government notice from 21 May 2025. It covers restaurants in Thailand and overseas, and packaged Thai food. The tiers now are one star, two stars, three stars, and Casual. They look at flavour and how the plate is presented, the room, hygiene, the chef, and the ingredients. There’s a new logo built around an orchid. The same notice says more than 170 restaurants in 22 countries already hold it, plus packaged food. So the mark is meant for eating Thai food away from Thailand, which is the only question I care about here.

That’s a real standard. It is not a recipe.

The notice doesn’t promise a heat level. It doesn’t name a dish. A logo on the door can mean the kitchen is trying to cook Thai food the Thai way. It cannot tell you whether you will like it.

A plate of pad thai with shrimp, lime, and bean sprouts — Pad thai, not a certificate. Photo: Index Librorum Permissorum / Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

What I look for anyway

These are mine. They are not official, and I won’t pretend they are.

A short menu. Fish sauce on the table, and the chilli one next to it, not a sweet red bottle and nothing else. Food that is cooked when you order it. If the menu runs to eighty dishes and none of them smell like a pan just came off the heat, I order less and I don’t go back.

Chillies, lemongrass, galangal, lime, and shallots laid out for a curry paste — If these aren't in the building, the logo won't save the curry. Photo: FotoosVanRobin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

What I’ve actually eaten

What I wrote down was never a logo. It was whether the food worked.

DipGarden, on the fifth floor of KITTE in Osaka does Thai and Indian, and it was surprisingly good. The surprise belongs to the plate. Paper Moon was very impressive, better than Banyan Tree, and I didn’t name the dish. The meal carried it.

None of them mention a logo. The food did the work, or it didn’t. That’s still how I decide, whether Thai SELECT is on the door or not.

Shrimp and vegetables in a curry, still in the pan — Cooked in the pan, not held. Photo: Roozitaa / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Sushi, lightly

People argue about sushi rice, the knife, and the counter. I’m not ranking that against Thai food. Different craft. The fair ask is smaller. Outside Thailand, I want to know the cook is working from Thai taste, not a generic sauce with a Thai name on it.

Thai SELECT is the closest official answer I could find. Authenticity, hygiene, the chef, the ingredients. Not a promise that the curry will be hot enough.

Look for the mark if it’s on the door. Then taste the food. The mark doesn’t eat for you.