How do you decide where to eat?

Most tools hand you a ranked list of thirty restaurants, which moves the work rather than doing it. Savor Scout takes your craving and location and returns one restaurant, showing its match score, what it beat, and the evidence behind the pick.

How do you pick a restaurant as a group?

Savor Scout group rooms turn it into a 90-second vote. The host shares a link, everyone taps yes on anything they would eat, and each person gets one veto to remove an option for the group. When two options remain the vetoes stop and votes decide. No app or signup is needed.

Yes. Searching and group rooms are free, no app download is required, and you can run one search without creating an account.

How is Savor Scout different from Google Maps or Yelp?

Maps and Yelp are directories that rank everything and leave the deciding to you. Savor Scout makes the call. It reads menus and reviews for the specific dish you asked about rather than ranking places by overall star average, and it shows its reasoning. Its place data comes from the same public sources, so the difference is the selection, not the data.

Savor Scout › Food guides › Thai food

How to find good Thai food

Thai food is built on a balance of hot, sour, salty and sweet. The version that travelled abroad tends to have the sweet dial turned up and the other three turned down, which is why so much of it tastes broadly the same.

What separates a good one from a bad one

Sour and salty as loud as the sweet — Fish sauce, lime, tamarind and chilli all present and assertive. A dish that is mostly sweet with a little heat has been adjusted.
Curry paste pounded in the kitchen — Fresh paste smells of galangal, lemongrass and lime leaf. Jarred paste is flatter and more uniform, and it is what most curries are made from.
A regional label — Isaan, Northern, Southern. Isaan in particular — the food of the northeast — is a distinct cuisine with som tam, larb, grilled meats and sticky rice.
Heat that is real when asked for — A kitchen that will actually cook Thai-hot rather than adding chilli flakes at the end. Reviews from Thai customers are the best evidence of this.
A second menu — As with Chinese restaurants, plenty of Thai kitchens run a separate menu. Asking is worth it.

What to order

Som tam — Green papaya salad, pounded to order. The single best test of an Isaan kitchen — it should be fiercely hot, sour and funky.
Larb — Minced meat with toasted rice powder, lime, chilli and herbs. Should be dry and sharp, not saucy.
Khao soi — Northern Thai coconut curry noodle soup with crisp noodles on top. One of the great noodle dishes and still uncommon.
Boat noodles — Dark, intense, spiced beef or pork noodle soup. Small bowls, ordered several at a time.
Southern curries — Gaeng som, gaeng tai pla. The hottest food in Thailand and rarely found abroad.
Pad thai, knowingly — A genuine dish and a good one, and also the dish most likely to have been sweetened into candy. Judge a kitchen by anything else first.

How Savor Scout looks for it

Thai searches read for regional terms and for specific dishes rather than ranking by rating, because the highest-rated Thai restaurant in a given area is often the one most adjusted to a general palate. Reviews mentioning real heat, Isaan dishes, or a separate menu push a place up substantially.

Find Thai food near you →

Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

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Related food guides

curry, noodles, salads, soup

When you might want this

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