Chiang Mai Cooking Class Menu 2026: Every Dish You Cook

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Most Chiang Mai schools teach the same core dishes, the ones people order at Thai restaurants all over the world. They are the right ones to learn: once you can make a curry paste and balance a tom yum, the rest of the cuisine opens up.

This guide goes through the dishes, the menu at each school, the curry paste, khao soi and the Akha hill tribe dishes at Thai Akha Kitchen, and the northern food you will have to eat rather than cook.

The quick answer

Expect four to ten dishes: a soup (tom yum or tom kha), a curry with a paste you pound by hand, a stir-fry such as pad thai, a starter like spring rolls or papaya salad, and mango sticky rice. Most schools let you choose within each course. The Smile full day ($36) lists ten dishes including khao soi, and Thai Akha Kitchen ($42) adds three Akha dishes.

A grey stone mortar of red curry paste with a wooden pestle, surrounded by dried red chillies, shallots, garlic, lemongrass, galangal and coriander roots — Red curry paste, the one skill from the class you will use most at home.

What dishes do you cook in a Thai cooking class?

One dish from each course: soup, curry, stir-fry, starter and dessert. You pick from three or four options in most courses.

Soups: tom yum (hot and sour, usually with prawns) or tom kha (chicken in coconut milk with galangal).
Curries: green, red, panang, massaman, and at several schools khao soi.
Stir-fries: pad thai, cashew chicken, holy basil chicken (pad kaprao), morning glory, and at Benny’s pad see ew and drunken noodles.
Starters: fried or fresh spring rolls, papaya salad (som tam), a chicken salad.
Dessert: mango sticky rice almost everywhere, pumpkin in coconut milk at Thai Akha Kitchen.

Couples and friends often choose different dishes in each course and swap plates. It doubles what you get to taste.

Three smiling women in brown aprons at gas burners in an evening cooking school, one tossing vegetables in a wok, plates of finished dishes on the steel counter — Each course goes from wok to plate in minutes, and you eat it before the next one starts.

Do you make your own curry paste?

Yes, at nearly every school. You pound it by hand in a stone or clay mortar, then cook your curry with it.

A red or green paste is shallots, garlic, lemongrass, galangal, chillies (dried for red, fresh for green), kaffir lime zest, coriander root and shrimp paste, pounded until no fibres show. It takes ten to fifteen minutes of steady work, and the teacher will take a turn if your arm gives out.

Siam Garden gives every guest their own mortar and lets you choose green, red, massaman or khao soi paste. At Thai Akha Kitchen the paste comes with whichever of four curries you pick. A Grandma’s Home guest wrote that it was "very cool to be able to make the curry paste from scratch". At home, a few spoonfuls freeze well for weeks.

Two young women in red aprons sitting on a woven mat, one pounding paste in a stone mortar, other guests working at mortars behind them — Paste-making is done sitting down at some schools, on mats with one mortar each.

Want to pound your own paste and pick all six dishes? Siam Garden gives every guest a mortar and a choice in each course.

Check dates for the Siam Garden morning class

What is on each school’s menu?

The core dishes repeat. The differences are how many you cook, how much you choose, and whether khao soi or a northern dish appears.

Menus as listed on Viator in November 2026. Most schools let you pick one dish from each line.

School	Starter	Soup	Curry	Stir-fry	Dessert
Smile half day	Spring roll	Tom yum or tom kha kai	Green, red, massaman or khao soi	Pad thai, cashew chicken or pad kaprao	Not listed
Smile full day	Spring roll and papaya salad	Tom yum and tom kha kai	Green, massaman and khao soi	Pad thai and cashew chicken	Mango sticky rice
Thai Akha Kitchen	Papaya salad and fried spring rolls	Tom kha, tom yum or egg tofu soup	Red, green, panang or massaman, with paste	One more main, your choice	Mango sticky rice and pumpkin in coconut milk
Siam Garden	Papaya salad, spring rolls or chicken salad	Tom yum and more	Green, red, massaman or khao soi, with paste	Pad thai, cashew chicken, morning glory or basil chicken	Mango sticky rice
Grandma’s Home	None	Tom yum or tom kha	Green, red or khao soi	Pad thai	Mango sticky rice, served
The Rice Barn	None	Tom yum with prawns	Green or panang	Pad thai and cashew chicken	Mango sticky rice

Do Chiang Mai cooking classes teach khao soi?

Several do. Smile, Siam Garden, Grandma’s Home and Benny’s all list khao soi as a curry option. Thai Akha Kitchen and The Rice Barn do not.

Khao soi is the dish of Chiang Mai: egg noodles in a coconut curry broth, a tangle of crispy fried noodles on top, with pickled mustard greens, shallots and lime on the side. It is usually traced to the Chin Haw, Chinese Muslims from Yunnan whose mule caravans traded through the north in the 1800s. The name is often glossed as "cut rice", though Wikipedia notes it may come from the Burmese word for noodles, khao swè.

In class you pound the khao soi paste, which leans on dried spices more than a green curry does, and fry your own topping noodles. Compare yours with the long-running shops on Faham Road, north-east of the Old City, the next day.

A blue and white bowl of khao soi with a chicken drumstick, egg noodles in orange curry broth and a nest of crispy noodles, side dishes of pickled mustard greens, shallots and lime — Khao soi with all the sides. Pick it as your curry wherever it is offered.

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What are the Akha dishes at Thai Akha Kitchen?

Three dishes from the Akha hill tribe: a chilli sauce called sapi thong, a salad and a soup, cooked alongside the Thai classics.

The Akha are a hill people who came south from Yunnan into Myanmar and, from the early 1900s, the mountains of northern Thailand. Most of the Akha in Thailand live in Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai provinces. Thai Akha Kitchen is run by an Akha family, and its listing says that in Akha tradition every meal must have a chilli sauce, one salad and one soup.

That makes this the longest menu of the half-day classes: two starters, two desserts, the three Akha dishes, a curry with paste, a soup and one more main of your choice. The school serves its own Akha hill tribe coffee. A guest in October 2026 summed it up: "The menu was extensive and delicious. Dont forget to try their tea."

How spicy is the food you cook?

As spicy as you make it. You add the chillies yourself, so mild is easy and nobody minds.

At your own station you decide how many chillies go into the paste and the wok. A Thai Akha Kitchen guest in October 2026 liked that "each participant makes their own version of the various dishes, allowing for customized heat". Tell the teacher before the chillies go in rather than after; you can add fresh chilli or chilli flakes at the table, but you cannot take it out.

Curry pastes carry the most heat, and green is often hotter than red. Massaman and khao soi are the gentle ones.

Which northern dishes will you not learn?

Most of them. Sai oua sausage, nam prik ong, laab muang and gaeng hung lay rarely make a class menu. Eat them instead.

Cooking schools teach the dishes visitors know. Northern Thai food is a different kitchen: sticky rice, chilli dips with raw vegetables, herby sausages, bitter greens and the Burmese-style pork curry gaeng hung lay. The best way to meet it is at a market at night.

The evening street food tour ($39) takes eight guests at most to two evening markets for sai oua, nam prik ong, tom saap, laab muang moo, khao soi gai and gaeng hung lay, and teaches you to order in Thai. A guest in August 2026: "I even learned how to say not spicy in Thai!"