What to eat when you have a cold

The specific problem with eating while congested is that most of what you call taste is smell, and yours has gone. Food is not bland because the kitchen under-seasoned it. It is bland because you are only getting salt, sweet, sour, bitter and heat — and those are the five things worth building the order around.

What's the best spicy food for a cold?

Hot, sour broths tend to land best — tom yum, hot and sour soup, pho with plenty of chilli and lime. When you're congested, most of what you taste is salt, sour and heat, because smell is what goes, and chilli registers as sensation rather than aroma. This is about what tastes good when you feel rough, not a remedy.

Which is genuinely useful information, because it tells you what to order. Chilli heat is not a taste at all — it is a pain response, and it works perfectly well when your nose does not. So does sour. So does salt. A bowl of tom yum, a hot and sour soup, a proper pho with plenty of lime and chilli, a bowl of congee with pickles: these all land when a subtly seasoned dish registers as warm nothing.

The other half is steam and liquid, which is the reason every culture's sick-day food is a soup. Nobody needs to make a health claim about it for it to be true that a bowl of hot broth is pleasant to sit over when you feel terrible, and that a sandwich is not.

The practical constraint is that you probably should not be in a restaurant. This is the one situation on this site where delivery or collection is the right answer, and it is worth choosing a restaurant on the basis that soup travels well — which it does, far better than anything fried.

What to order:

Hot, sour and spicy — Tom yum, hot and sour soup, pho with extra lime and chilli, sinigang, menudo. These work through channels that congestion does not block.
Broth over solids — Easy to eat with no appetite, and pleasant to hold.
Ginger, garlic, lime, chilli, black pepper — Strong, simple flavours that do not rely on aroma to register.
Congee, jook or any rice porridge — Mild, warm, and requires nothing of you. The one exception to the go-bold rule, for when even chewing is unappealing.
Something that travels — Soup in a sealed container survives a delivery ride. Anything crisp does not.

Try this search

Savor Scout takes a sentence rather than a category, so the criteria above can go straight into the box. For this, something like “hot and sour soup, delivery or pickup, open now” works — it reads menus and reviews for those specific things and comes back with one place and the reasons it picked it.

Search “hot and sour soup, delivery or pickup, open now” →

What usually goes wrong

Anything delicate or expensive — you will not taste it and the money is wasted. Anything fried, which arrives soft. And do not go and sit in a restaurant with a streaming cold; get it to go.

What to eat

Worth considering here: pho, soup, Thai food, Chinese food, ramen.