Thai Fine Dining Menu Template

You’re better off designing the menu yourself than paying someone else. Menuzen has greatly simplified things with advanced menu templates and easy-to-use design tools. All you need to do is change a few things on any of Menuzen’s stunning templates to get what you want.

Plus, Menuzen’s team of experts will be with you every step of the way with the free 24/7 support on offer.

There are also some psychological factors of a typical Thai fine dining menu design, which are essential to designing a menu that ensures profit targets are met.

Consider removing monetary symbols from your pricing. Also, don’t design a two-column menu with prices listed in ascending or descending order. Customers can feel demeaned by such a move, especially when in the company of others.

If you intend to print the menu on paper, be advised that people study menus in a particular way. They’re unlikely to ever study your menu items one after another from the top left-hand side. Instead, their eyeballs scan the menu, mainly from the top left-hand corner to the far right, down to the bottom left and then the bottom right-hand corner. Their eyes linger around the centre of the menu for a while, and this is where you should place your most profitable dishes.

Below is a detailed description of our three most common Thai fine dining dishes.

1. Tom Kha Kai

Tom kha kai, also known as Thai coconut soup or tom kha gai, is a flavourful, sour, hot soup garnished with coconut milk in Thai cuisine. The ingredients used in preparing this Thai delicacy include chicken broth, lemongrass, galangal, shallots, palm sugar, fish sauce, coconut milk, tomato, mushroom (preferably the oyster or beech mushrooms), lime leaves, Thai chillies, sliced chicken breasts, and green onion.

Its preparation starts with cooking chicken breast to add to the broth. Use the broth to cook the tomatoes, onions, galangal, lemongrass, shallots, mushrooms, chilli, lime leaves, coconut milk, fish, sugar, and any other experimental ingredient you want to add for yours to stand out as a truly fine dining tom kha kai dish. Having implemented your creative twists in your tom kha kai dish, you can introduce it to your diners using any of the Thai restaurant menu templates available on Menuzen.

2. Khao Pad Goong

This is a simple and quick dish that’s delicious and boasts a wide breadth of ingredients. Its traditional ingredients are white rice, cucumber, lime, tomato, spring onion, soy sauce, fish sauce, black pepper, prawn, garlic clove, eggs, and any other innovative ingredient you want to try. There’s a lot of frying, but everything cooks so quickly.

You’ll start by cooking white rice without any seasoning. Afterwards, spoon your rice into a dish and let it cool. The next step is to fry the prawns. Remove the cooked prawns and fry the eggs; you should whisk the egg as it fries to break it up into pieces.

Add garlic and sauté to mix thoroughly with the egg, then add your cold-boiled rice. Fry the mix for a while and then introduce the prawns, followed by spring onion and the sauces. Plate up next to your limes, cucumber and tomatoes. It’s now ready to be displayed on a Menuzen Thai fine dining free menu template.

3. Tom Yum Goong

Tom yum goong, also referred to as tom yam, is a variety of hot and sour soup, often prepared with shrimp. The ingredients for this dish include prawns, shallots, galangal, tomatoes, chilli, kaffir lime, lemongrass, straw mushrooms, chicken broth, holy basil, sugar, and salt. The preparation is quick and easy.

While prawns are the primary food item here, you could make this a more innovative fine dining meal by pairing it with a separate dish—say, khao pad, for a hungry guest. This could be a good way to sell it to your customers.

To make this dish, you need to clean and chop your ingredients—aside from the prawns—into smaller pieces. Put everything in a pot, including the prawns and bring it to a boil. Once the prawns cook, set down your dish or turn off the heat.

See below our descriptions of the three most authentic Thai fine dining dishes.

1. Pad Thai

The ingredients include rice noodles, shallots, garlic, spring onions, radish, tofu, peanuts, chicken, shrimp, fish sauce, sugar, and tamarind concentrate. The ingredient shows this will be a heavy meal that can satisfy the hungriest customer. Also, the final dish looks pretty delicious with a vast content variety — some of which you may introduce in a bid to make your own unique Thai fine dining dish.

To make pad Thai, mix the flavouring ingredients in fish broth. Afterwards, fry your shrimp and chicken breasts in a pan, and fry tofu separately for a minute or two.

Add your chopped shallots and radish to the tofu and steer as the mixture cooks. Now, add rice noodles and the sauce-ingredients mixture to your tofu. You don’t add water to the food except when the noodles cook slowly.

2. Kaeung Kari Kai

Ingredients for this classic Thai yellow chicken curry are shallots, potatoes, vegetable oil, yellow kari (curry) paste, coconut milk, chicken, fish sauce, Thai basil, and sugar. To prepare this dish, add some vegetable oil to a saucepan and fry chopped shallots for 2–3 minutes; the primary food components are cooked together in the same pot. The final dish is a potato and chicken stew, which is usually served with white rice. A picture of this bowl should look good on any of Menuzen’s Thai menu templates.

3. Khao Niao Mamuang

Also known as mango and sticky rice, the ingredients include coconut milk, rice, mang beans, mangos, salt, and sugar.

To make this simple dish, wash and soak your rice for four hours, then cook it in boiling water for about 30 minutes. Whilst straining the water out of your rice, heat and stir a mix of coconut milk, salt, and sugar in a separate pan. Then add the coconut mix to your rice and let it sit for about 20 minutes for the rice to absorb the mixture.

Flip the rice over and wait another 20 minutes, during which time you should prepare the mang beans by boiling them and then frying them without oil to drain the moisture. The final dish is a combo of rice, beans, and mangos.

The primary flavours in Thai cooking are sweet, salt, savoury, umami, sour, bitter, pungent, spicy, and creamy. The ingredients that give these flavours include tamarind, kaffir, lemongrass, soy sauce, palm sugar, coconut milk, ginger, pepper, garlic, curries, salt and many others.

You’d discover that most Thai dishes use fish sauce, salt, and sugar. All classical dishes tend to comprise at least five flavours, which is why making Thai cuisines tend to be more complex than that of many other countries. You may curate distinct combinations of these various flavouring ingredients in your Thai fine dining restaurant, giving your diners that deluxe experience.

Apart from variations of the ones described above, other typical Thai fine dining meals include the modified forms of poh pia tod, pad kra pao moo, som tam Thai, gai pad med mamuang, gaeng panang gai, laab moo, moo satay, pad see ew, khao soi, khao niew mamuang, kai yad sai, among several others.

Their traditional names remain the same wherever you see these dishes, even when mixed with other food items. However, no two restaurants would cook them with precisely the same flavours. The reason is that there can be differences in the types and quantities of ingredients used or even how it’s cooked, depending on the chef. With that said, you can experiment with different ingredients, amounts, and cooking methods to formulate a unique Thai dish for your fine dining restaurant.

If you're looking for some Thai fine dining menu design ideas, it is important to note that there’s no universal procedure for laying out you menu for your Thai restaurant. You can create a Thai fine dining restaurant menu from several dozen templates on Menuzen, each of which will sell your dishes well. Any layout you find on Menuzen has been thoughtfully created, taking into account a menu's critical features, such as clarity, aesthetics, legibility, psychology, and several others.

Some restaurants prefer a simple text-only menu, while others use images heavily. Ultimately, it depends on your choice and the variety of dishes for the menu. You can divide the menu into columns and even groups. While you’re at it, endeavour to clearly separate the four critical features of menu items: image, title, description, and price.