The Thai cooking-class business has been a rising star, with increasing demand from tourists who love spicy Thai dishes and want to learn how to cook them for families and friends, and for foreign chefs who wanted to offer Thai food on their menus.On average about a thousand foreigners a year attend the classes at the Thai Cooking School at the Mandarin Oriental Bangkok alone. The majority of the students are from Europe although over the past couple of years it has seen an increasing number of tourists from China and Japan. The latter always attend classes in a family pack.
Perennially popular dishes include pad thai and tom yam koong as well as nam prik (chilli paste) is also gaining favour unlike in the past when foreigners felt the dish was too spicy and had a pungent smell of shrimp paste.
