Once you learn what to look for, you’ll find noodle shops all over the place in Thailand, but it took us a while to learn to find them. In the touristy areas it’s easy since they will all have English on the sign, but step just a block away and you’ll find lots of street food and restaurants with everything written in Thai. This is where you get the best food if you know what to look for.
The key is to look for these Thai characters: ก๋วยเตี๋ยว which means noodles, pronounced kway-tee-ow. But practically speaking, all you have to look for is a sign with the “chicken letter” with a plus on top: ก๋ with a bunch of letters after it. It’s almost always a noodle shop because that’s one of the only food words that starts with that symbol.
The menus vary, but these places will almost always have noodle soup (kway-tee-ow naam), and may also have pad Thai (ผัดไทย), pad see ew, pad kee mow, and other noodle dishes.
To know what kind of protein is in it, you should learn the Thai symbols and words for chicken (ไก่ gai), pork (หมู moo), prawn (กุ้ง gueng), and tofu (เต้าหู้ tao-hoo).
We used this today to find an excellent pad Thai with pork cracklings, 25km away from anything touristy. It’s funny though, the locals predicted we would order pad Thai as we walked up, whispering “farang” and “pad Thai”, and giggled when we asked for it; I guess it’s kind of stereotypical for westerners to order pad Thai, but damn it’s so good! And it was the first item on the menu, so it was their specialty! No regrets, best meal we’ve had in days.