Thailand's government is trying to raise the profile of it's authentic Thai cuisine around the world in a bid to put Thailand's famous Pad Thai Noodles and Tom Yam Kung soup in modern Thai Fast Food outlets at the same height as Mac Donald burgers and other well know international fast-food chains.

Thailand has a culture that takes it's National food very seriously and at the cost of 30 million Baht (US$ $700,000), the Thai government is sending more than 600 Thai chefs abroad to teach the world about authentic Thai food as part of a 3-year project to setup new benchmarks for the quality of Thai food overseas.

The project's manager Napavarn Noparatnaraporn said that too many Thai dishes which are served in Thai restaurants abroad are only authentic Thai by name. Real Thai cooking is a science. You can modify the taste of a dish, but the recipe and the ingredients should always follow the authentic ancient Thai recipes, he added.

Apart from practical training, the participants, that will go overseas, will go through a 72 hour theory session, learning the whole cycle, from how to find Thai ingredients abroad, using modern kitchen techniques to prepare ancient Thai recipes, and even how to do bookkeeping, price calculation and restaurant management abroad.

What we are trying to achieve with this promotion program, is to systematize the concept about Thai restaurants abroad and putting authentic Thai food in a more understandable and comprehensible perspective with more guidelines, so that the authentic Thai food from Thailand, can be mapped against certain official benchmarks.

Noparatnaraporn further said, that while the quality of authentic Thai food is very important, it is not the only factor that makes a Thai restaurant abroad great. The food quality, the ingredients and the authentic Thai recipes only add up to 50 percent of the success of a Thai restaurant abroad. The other 50 percent depends on the management and advertising of the authentic Thai restaurant concept.

A modern Thai restaurant formula for authentic Thai taste is currently also tested out by the CP Food Group, Thailand's largest business conglomerate who has recently opened a new style of Thai fast food restaurant in Bangkok, and now plans to open Thai Fast Food Outlets in all mayor cities of the world, mirroring the Mac Donald fast food concept.

Those new style of Thai fast foods restaurants would not have chefs, but only highly trained kitchen hands. What we want to do, is use modern technology and advanced kitchen equipment blended with the ancient traditional way of Thai cooking, so that we can produce authentic tasting Thai food without the need of a Thai chef, said Joseph Lau from CP Global Kitchen.

Only by using such a revolutionary system, could we open up more than 500,000 Thai restaurants in the International markets, serving authentic Thai cuisine to the world, without the need of a Thai kitchen chef for each restaurant.