Which country has the best cuisine?

token101 wrote: »

I Asian food, especially Thai and Malaysian, is absolutely horrible.

Threads like this should be banned.

Turkey or Hungry.

RDM_83 again wrote: »

Used to go on a lot of holidays to Italy when I was younger and I completely agree with the above. It can be lovely but it tends to be massively carb based with the meat being pretty poor as I remember and the bread just isn't a patch on France.

I prefer the Italian food in the US to the food I had in Italy. Italian sheepskin milk cheeses are good though, and I like a lot of their aperitifs. Prefer French food. It's more interesting.

I think sometimes we completely underrate what's available in Ireland too. We've really good ingredients and an ever-increasingly experimental approach to food where people are pulling in all sorts of influences from all over the globe and combining them.

"Celtic Fusion" type cuisine can really be top notch stuff.

Irish artisan food's also really becoming very interesting.

It varies by place, but if you're in Dublin and Cork in particular there's just a vast array of amazing food.
In more far-flung parts of Ireland you'll still come across gems here and there too.

Internationally, I think the same's true, a lot of countries that are not extremely arrogant about their own national cuisine tend to be capable of drawing in influences from everywhere and making really amazing food.

Some of the best food I've had has been in places like Canada, New Zealand and the USA as well as Britain and Ireland.

In European terms, I was quite surprised at how good proper Belgian gourmet food is. We tend to overlook and write-off some of the small countries.

Spanish food's also very underrated, perhaps because most of us have only ever really experienced the resorts where they are really aiming the food at what they think English and Germans eat which is usually way off the mark.

There was also a huge explosion of foodiness in Spain in the boom years which has definitely had a big impact. A lot of the northern cities really have very interesting food go for a top notch meal in Bilbao, San Sebastian, Pamplona etc and you'll see what I mean. Pamplona's pinxoes (tapas in Basque) can be pretty impressive too.

I find Germany and Britain can be written off unfairly too. There is some excellent food in both places and they're both becoming very experimental and foodie in recent decades.

For me, good French food is actually the really high quality, rural, unpretentious stuff that's just made from excellent ingredients. I find what kills French cuisine for me is the pretentiousness of some of the restaurants. France has great food, but it also has a lot of very mediocre restaurants and cafes that charge way too much money for serving really bad quality, unimaginative dishes and I think it's doing France's food legacy no favours.
There are some amazing restaurants too, but there are too many bad ones that can give you service with bad attitude.

I recently had an experience in a Paris restaurant (quite a mediocre one) with two Spanish friends of mine who are very into their food and wine. The food was not great and the water was absolutely patronising.
We also went into a place that was calling itself a 'Tapas Bar' and when we ordered tapas we got unbelievable attitude because we weren't ordering a 4 course meal and this was in the French Basque Country which should know a thing or two about pinxoes and tapas ! The attitude was actually so bad we left the restaurant and didn't order!! I've never done that ANYWHERE else.

Italian food can be absolutely fantastic. I find the Italians just have great food and don't tend to be overly pretentious about it. The standard even in small cafes can be really high. The only thing that detracts from it is that they don't tend to reach out to other influences very much and it can become a bit bland just getting the same dishes over and over especially if you're in mid-priced restaurants all the time.

As for Chinese food, it can be absolutely amazing if you know what you're looking for. I have Chinese in-laws now and China's just such a vast place that trying to describe "Chinese food" as a single cuisine is a bit pointless. It's a whole continent of cuisines really and you can pick and it varies enormously. There are at least 8 regional cuisines that are quite dramatically different from each other. It's a bit like trying to just say "European Cuisine" There are some common threads that connect it in terms of noodles, ginger, some of the spices, but the regional variations are absolutely enormous and there are also dishes that are popular all over China too which could be considered 'national cuisine' I guess.

However, the Chinese restaurant food we get here from takeaways is a bit like concluding that American Cuisine is McDonalds. From what I gather, the Chinese restaurant menus we get pretty much came about through the popularisation of Chinese food in America in the 19th century and early 20th century. They're predominantly southern Chinese dishes that were adapted to the US pallet. That format was re-exported to the UK and Ireland probably mostly from the 1960s onwards which is how we ended up with Chop Suey and other dishes that don't exist in China

Chop Suey = tsap seui = Miscellaneous Leftovers in Chinese.

It's sort of what Pizza Hut is to Italian food