I took the food tour today and it was okay but two things really irritated me about it...

It is supposed to be a tasting of typical Thai foods. She said she differs from most tour guides and skips pad Thai, tom yum, and massaman curry as most Westerners say these are their favorite Thai dishes and you can get these all over Bangkok. She instead wanted us to try less common dishes or non-Thai dishes that Thais eat because she wanted us to know that people in Bangkok don't eat just Thai food. While this is a nice idea, it doesn't really make sense to me. If I was giving a Thai person a food tour in San Francisco I wouldn't give them a meal consisting of oysters Rockafeller, jambalaya, and bananas Foster - sure, you can get those in SF but they are not at all the best example of San Francisco food.

Second, a lot of the food was served family style which is fine, but she said she special ordered it mild since not all of us liked spicy food. The restaurants we went to did not have chiles available. She even admitted that the som tam we were served wasn't something she would like very much since it was lacking any spiciness which is a required component of the dish. Again, I understand that authentic spicy Thai food can be intense for people that aren't used to it, but you can't really claim something is authentic if you're special requesting it to be modified to be more Westernized.

We ended up eating a ton on this food tour so I was barely hungry the rest of the day. I had some Tom Yum soup at a mall (first time I've had it in Bangkok) and it was easily the best thing I've eaten here and was actually better than I get back home.