Review

It is a fun question going around the internet this past week, so here we go.

In particular, people focused on the question of France vs. America. As one would expect, those on the French side think those on the American side are crazy, it is insulting to even consider this a question. Those on the American side like food.

All of this is always just, like, your opinion, man, or at least that’s the story.

Checking the Survey Data

YouGov asked back in 2019, got the following answers across nations, which we were reminded of during current debate on Twitter of American versus French food.

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I will quibble, but I was impressed how good this list was for nationally identified cuisine, as opposed to in-country experience.

Where do I see obvious mistakes, ignoring the unfamiliar ones?

Everyone is underrating Brazilian because meat on swords is awesome, Pão de queijo is awesome, and the accompaniments are optional, if not diverse enough for the true top tier.

Mongolian is not even listed, and I am aware that what I call Mongolian is not in any way an authentic experience, where you fill a bowl with meats, noodles and sauces (and for some, vegetables) that they then grill for you, but that format is indeed excellent, and I will take advantage of it every chance I get. Which is not often. Somehow you cannot get Mongolian BBQ anywhere in New York City, although a comment did point me to one in the East Bay which helps.

I have two very different places I like to go for Lebanese, one low end and one high end. I’m not sure if this is a coincidence or not and what distinguishes them from other Middle Eastern cuisines, except perhaps their rice style. Either way, underrated.

America’s biggest mistake is underrating Indian quite a lot. Indian provides a unique set of flavors and experiences, done mediocre it is fine and done well it is very good. Only China and Thailand have it lower than America, and I am guessing that opinion is mostly not about the food.

Spanish and British seem clearly overrated here, although perhaps Spanish gets a lot better when Italian isn’t available locally. I have never not felt Spanish cuisine was an inferior good.

Thai food is very good when they don’t overdo the chili oil as a cheat code, but is likely higher than it should be due to its absurdly excellent marketing.

Korean is alien, they serve you all these things my brain refuses to agree are food, so while I still occasionally enjoy the straight Korean BBQ experience it always seems like an inferior good to me. But who am I to say?

I consider Italian to be Tier 0 and the clear #1, then Tier 1 can go mostly in any order for Chinese, Japanese, Indian and American. Tier 2 is Mexican, Thai, Brazilian, Greek and Lebanese, plus whatever includes Katz’s and Mongolian BBQ.

In practice that’s essentially all my meals. My wife will sometimes make what she calls Vietnamese Chicken and I occasionally go to The Halal Guys. Otherwise, that’s it.

Then there’s France.

Genius in France

French restaurants I see as overrated. I always feel like they want me to be impressed rather than that they want me to enjoy the food. And yes they are often very impressive, but who wants to pay for being impressed? Or they want to check off boxes.

Whereas Italian focuses on your experience of consuming food. In France or in French places, in my experience, everyone is implicitly trying to impress you in the same way (except the higher end places that want to impress you even more, but which made me mostly feel like I was being robbed, and sometimes lower end places are a pure simulacra) and everyone has the same menu that does little for me. As Tyler notes the hours are infuriatingly particular. If you messed up and went to the wrong place, it was bad, as in reheated frozen bad.

French style assumes you want to sit around and not eat painfully slowly before, during and after your meal, and that you want to plan all of this around drinking wine. I am fine with having a nice slow meal on occasion, to enjoy some company, but slowness for its own sake is painful, and like Tyler I do not drink. This is not an advantage.

French supermarkets I remember from my visits as being a huge pain in the neck where there is limited selection, the hours will often leave you hungry and they treat you rudely and badly. If you want exactly the handful of things they think you should want, and are willing to go at the times they want, you will do well, and I can survive for a few days on baguettes, butter and cheese. For more than a few days, none of that interests me.

Bakeries are a different story. Yes, the croissants and other pastries are amazing, I give them that. The baguettes are iconic but like their other breads they are only average, and a generally bad design.

This might be consistent with Nate Silver’s position that they do better for the 20th percentile, where that is indeed the best you can do, but it must get repetitive quickly.

France loses badly on variety all around. The supermarkets and French restaurants are narrow and similar, and there are not so many foreign alternatives available.

Tyler Cowen as usual offers mostly completely different considerations than mine. Perhaps there are indeed small towns with amazing specialties, but once again that is anti-variety that benefits no one most of the time. What is the point? The idea is to have one of everything here, not to have everything of one type in each place and have to travel.

I Thought This Was America

What about here in America?

Where to put American food depends on what you mean by that. If you mean things that are distinctively American, then I go by the earlier rankings, and have it as somewhere between second and fifth.

If you mean the overall quality of experience of eating in the USA versus in other countries, we are number one, and it is not close, because on top of other considerations we have the best of all possible worlds via our diversity. I get great versions of everything, the variety is amazing even in generic places but especially places like New York City, and I always find a plethora of good choices wherever I travel. Within walking distance of my apartment there is an amazing version of everything I like to eat.

I do realize New York is an outlier, but you still do very well in other places. Restaurant variety is mostly off the charts good, the standard strip mall sees to it and quality is typically not bad at all.

Nate Silver does his analysis, and he concurs. If you make an effort to find the best restaurants, and especially if you want to live in a place, New York City is the food king of the Western world, although I can’t speak to the comparison to Tokyo.

Nate notes that you cannot purely stumble into a place in New York and do all that well. Yes and no. You cannot go in with zero information, but if you know how to read Google Maps and are willing to consider several options, you can do very well overall, although many great places are still easy to miss. The problem is Asian food, where people are too obsessed with superficial questions in reviews, so it can be very tricky to identify the very good places, and they often have only 4.2-style ratings.

He notes that wait times at good places can be tough, but I have mostly found the opposite, all you have to do is not test the prime spots on Friday and Saturday evenings and 95% of even great places are no problem, unless you are going into the multiple-Michelin-star land where I don’t want to go anyway. Yes I have issues with Four Charles Prime Rib or Carbone but there are so many other options.

Nate’s theory is that some places in California have the best American median quality of all meals or all restaurant meals consumed, perhaps in the San Francisco area, because they combine strong local produce quality, strong variety, few chain restaurants and he does not mention this but very high income to spend on all of it.

What I love most about American food, and eating in America in general, is that it is the opposite of the French mistake of trying to impress you or waste your time. American food wants you to be happy, it wants to give you the experience you want and not hold back, it values your time and it does not much care how it looks doing it. There is the high end variation where it does care what it looks like, at which point it is a kind of generic Italian with a lower average and ceiling but still solid.

Americans spend less time on meals than others. A lot of this is that we spend a lot less time waiting. Some of that is that we have baked speed into our designs, some of that is caring about service and not making people wait endlessly for no reason. Is there something nice about a quiet relaxed meal? There certainly can be, if you want that no one will rush you. Even when I want to relax, I don’t want to be forced to wait.

America did optimize somewhat too hard on speed and convenience for a while, at the expense of quality. I find most of that is gone by now, and what is left is the best of both worlds.

There is one actual downside. America does not much care about your waistline, so do be careful of that. American foods both are generally not so healthy and also the portions are absurdly large. You need to know when to quit.

What about our supermarkets? Once again, we knock variety out of the park. We might not deliver on your country’s particular specialty but overall the places are huge and do not waste their space, and you can choose to go cheap or go fancy at every step. Produce is the one place we may have some issues due to longer supply chains, as Nate Silver suggests, combined with less customer discernment on that front. I am one of those non-discerning customers, because I have little use for the produce, and also can afford to and do hit artisan stores often.

Note that much American food is in optimized to survive having mediocre ingredient quality, whereas other top cuisines rely on quality ingredients to work. If your ingredients are indeed mediocre, American is your best bet, with Chinese the only other consideration. If your ingredients are top notch, you more often want to go in another direction to take advantage of this.

Nate thinks that because of our penchant for fast food, prioritization of speed and reluctance to spend time eating, median meal quality here is going to end up lower.

I think speed and convenience matters, but sometimes Americans do take this too far. If you ignore the value of speed, and you care a lot about produce quality, than perhaps we fall behind on the median meal due to all the fast food at home and outside it. But much fast food has gotten remarkably good, and also we are much richer and can far more often pay for better and more varied things. Also I think we focus a lot more on what we actually like, not only less on formalism, and this matters.

The Upgrade

I think that American food suffered a quite horrible period centered on the 1950s, from a combination of the effects of prohibition on our restaurant industry and the impact of various new weird industrial foods and a focus on mass production over quality. Things were dire. That reputation persists.

But then American food got The Upgrade steadily over the last 50 years. It has radically improved in quality and variety over my lifetime, and it is very easy to find the ones with higher quality if you pay attention when trying places and do even a little gradient descent, and combine this with Google Maps.

Even fast food has radically improved. Shake Shack and In & Out are vastly different than McDonalds and Burger King. We now have fast salad chains, fast quality Mexican chains and much more.

Whereas to the extent you like French food, it seems to be because it has done its best to stay exactly the same.

The counterargument is that we do have to answer for Olive Garden and Applebee’s. Which somehow are still bringing Americans together?

Abstract: We use location data to study activity and encounters across class lines. Low-income and especially high-income individuals are socially isolated: more likely than other income groups to encounter people from their own social class.

Casual restaurant chains, like Olive Garden and Applebee’s, have the largest positive impact on cross-class encounters through both scale and their diversity of visitors. Dollar stores and local pharmacies like CVS deepen isolation. Among publicly-funded spaces, libraries and parks are more redistributive than museums and historical sites. And, despite prominent restrictions on chain stores in some large US cities, chains are more diverse than independent stores. The mix of establishments in a neighborhood is strongly associated with cross-class Facebook friendships.

This goes back to The Upgrade. Before The Upgrade, if you were able to access an Olive Garden or even an Applebee’s you were doing all right. It was food, and you could eat it. After a given sector got The Upgrade, we learned you could do so much better. Even so, I am often reminded that such places are not so bad. There is a famous Pro Magic player from another country who loves Olive Garden. The last time I was traveling and ended up at Applebee’s went fine, and the value cannot be denied.

Again, it’s not great, but it is food. It is what is sometimes called the great middle, everyone can eat something and you have a nice place to hang, it will be fine and everyone can agree on it, in exchange you are not at a good spot on the cost-quality curve.

I get why the poor use such places. I l do not know what rich people are still doing, in 2023, at either establishment? Or why people would actively travel to such lousy chain restaurants, breaking geography?

A theory is that it is exactly the mixing that is enabled here. A party of four rich people would never choose Applebee’s. However, a party of two rich and two poor people might, the poor can afford it and not feel sick about the price, and the rich can get a form of dining they are familiar with and can abide and also trust. They would perhaps all be better served by the actually good cheap local place, but cannot coordinate on this. And such places offer the trappings of socialization in ways fast food places don’t, even when the rich go to such places they don’t stay to mingle.

Note also that this could be reverse causation. Perhaps we do not mingle because we go to Applebee’s, instead we have an Applebee’s because we mingle. If we did not need to find such compromises, the place would rapidly no longer be in business.

Conclusion

To me America is the clear winner. Quality is strong and improving. You get endless variety, both at restaurants and at the supermarket. Even when I lived in a small town like Warwick, none of the places worth going to were duplicative at all, so I had a decent rotation even in a very small town. Even when we slum it, we do so for good reason, and get things in return that we value. Our wealth lets us afford all of this.

Certainly you can argue that on a per-meal basis, the median meal eaten in France might be, in the sense that a food critic might evaluate it in isolation and ignoring costs including time (or even having the perverse opinion that longer time spent is a benefit rather than a cost), better than the median American meal, either at a restaurant or overall, due to the considerations of fast food and produce quality, but that is a poor proxy for overall quality of life or experience related to food.

To me, the real question is America versus Italy. Italian food in Italy is often outstanding, although as usual you need to beware, my visit to Rome was a mix of reliably outstanding Italian places that I searched for carefully, as good as such food gets, and reliable true disaster when going places on a whim while walking around, including some truly inedible places trying to pretend to sell you pizza. I presume that once you get into less tourist style places, the ratio turns more favorable. But, as Nate Silver points out, if you want non-Italian food the pickings will be quite slim. The Italian bench is deep, but only so deep. So it’s great if you both are only going to be there at most a few weeks and pay enough attention to find the good side of the divide.

In terms of actually living somewhere purely for the food, I wouldn’t be anywhere else.

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(Disclosures: am American.  Strong views presented without evidence.)

The most damning indictment of French food I can think of is the fact that American capitalism hasn't even bothered stealing it.  We have Italian restaurants on every corner, Chinese and Mexican and Thai and Indian and Korean and every other cuisine from every other corner of the world...except French.  One time I went to a Korean hotpot place, but it was too full and had a long wait, so instead of waiting I walked to a different Korean hotpot restaurant.  There are two German restaurants within a few minutes' walk of my apartment, because even if German cuisine isn't a contender for the top spot it's at least good at what it does.

And then we have one very fancy French place per state that stays in business by pandering to a tiny number of pretentious food critics who care about every aspect of food except its taste.

American capitalism "stealing" food is usually a process of lower-income, unskilled migrants moving to a country and adapting their cuisines to American tastes/ ingredients, which explains the wave of Italian (historically), Chinese, Mexican, Thai and Indian places far better than the quality of their respective cuisines. Not sure about Korean/ Japanese places (higher income), but (in Europe at least) they're mostly run by people from Wenzhou, unless they're high-end, which may be an interesting exception to the rule. 

I'd guess you see very few restaurants from countries with low outmigration (East Africa) or higher-income migrants (Northern Europe). 

In places in North America where they actually had a significant wave of French migrants, like Quebec, you see a lot of French cuisine. 

This wouldn't explain the "German restaurant phenomenon" you identify, but I think you'll need some more evidence to back that up. I tried to get an estimate of this disparity by googling a few US cities, like: "chicago "german restaurant"" and "chicago "French restaurant"". There seem to be 4 times as many results for French.

I'll hazard a guess that there are more French restaurants in the US than restaurants of any other European cuisine except Italian.

I wrote a reply to this but it got too long, so I posted it as its own post.

On the other hand, Euros will constantly denigrate American food by appeal to the most unsophisticated examples of our cuisine, all the while pretty much every corner of their continent imports McDonald's by the kiloton. Revealed preferences.

A few points:

  • Europeans denigrate the American food they are exposed to, which is the "unsophisticated" stuff that they import the most of. It would be weird if they spent their time ripping into gumbo and fried rattlesnake.
  • Regular consumers of McDonalds in Europe are not the same people who also denigrate American food. The people who denigrate American cuisine are usually also a little sneering towards domestic consumers of McD.
  • Many consumers (in US and Europe) see McD cuisine as an inferior product, but it has obvious benefits beyond taste (convenience/ speed/ child-friendliness/ toilets/ wi-fi). 

Am I a pretentious food critic if I say "it's popular because it contains a lot of sugar"?

Though, to be fair, Asian food is popular because it contains a lot of sodium glutamate, etc.

*

Perhaps more importantly, fast food has the advantage that you can just grab it and go, so people also choose it for reasons other than taste.

Your argument is sound but I think it's actually because of its diversity in the base foods. Pasta and pizza is 95% of italian food, rice and noodles are the base of 80% of chinese/japanese/korean food, etc... In french cuisine, there is no base that is often used so you must have a lot of different ingredients. Not the best thing when you operate at "small scale" (when you're not very expensive or cheesecake factory)

I don't know if french restaurants are pretentious outside of france, but that looks more like a parisian problem than a french one.

I am confused to see multiple people make the '95% pasta/pizza' claim about Italian, Secondi is very much a thing, as are appetizers, even in NYC where pizza is everywhere I'd say maybe 65% when dining out.

When dining in, I suppose yes, because we wouldn't think of the other dishes as Italian then - I don't make an 'Italian steak' it's just a steak, etc. 

95% was most likely an overexaggeration but that was to underline the main idea that overall if all of your recipes need several ingredients that will be used in none of the other recipes, it's much harder to make a restaurant work.

When dining in, I suppose yes, because we wouldn't think of the other dishes as Italian then - I don't make an 'Italian steak' it's just a steak, etc. 

Indeed, I may be biased but many "italian things" do feel like normal things were "italian" has been added to it because they have a great cooking culture. Especially among the appetizers, where the spanish do the same, incorporating every small dish under the tapas umbrella

On a recent trip to China I found the trend there - at least for fancy meals - is low carb, with few noodles and often no rice at all.

That's true for fancy meals, the opposite for regular diets. Chinese people have very high-carb diets (200 kg of grains (rice/ wheat) per person, one of the higher grain consumers globally), but fancy meals are intended to signal prestige, so therefore avoid cheap carbs. 

But when you go to a chinese place that's what you expect right ? Overall, even italian food is not as restricted as my comment makes it look but when you go to an italian restaurant you expect pasta and pizza

Cuisines are not limited to what is sold abroad as X cuisine but it's easier to sell when customers can know pretty much what to expect. That's not doable with french food, which is what I was trying to say

That could also explain why French bakeries, with their staple and iconic baguette and croissant, seem to be faring better in my experience.

100%! I have seen abroad varieties of pastries that I have never seen in France (often weird ones) and I did not understand why but this actually makes it sense, if 50% of what you sell is "croissant with XYZ" it's an easier sell. Can't believe I did not get that before

Gregor in Berkeley is a take out French restaurant in Berkeley available to franchise. La Note, Berkeley’s not overpriced French restaurant, went brunch only after the pandemic!

I went to Le Note last visit and of man did it make me miss the old Venus Cafe.

Mongolian BBQ is completely divorced from the ethnic cuisine of Mongolia, which is heavy in meat and fat and (within my limited knowledge) not very flavorful. I've watched a food vlog and ... yeah, it's fatty lamb boiled in plain broth. Food is subjective, but I'm sure that wasn't what you were thinking.

What we know as Mongolian BBQ was actually invented in Taiwan on the 1950's and given that name for a pretty arbitrary reasons. (As an aside how many food names with a country name are actually from that place? Usually it's tenuous connections at best like how Hawaiian pizza was named because of pineapples and actually invented in Canada).

In the mid-90s I spent a week in Mongolia. I was a child, and a somewhat picky eater so that may have clouded my judgement, but I thought the food was very bad. I remember that every meal involved some kind of yoghurt, which I think may have been made from horse or yak milk and in hindsight I now think was mildly alcoholic. I loved yoghurt, I hated that stuff. Indeed, I ended up subsisting on crisp packets, apples and fasting for the last few days, and the fact my parents allowed this said a lot about what they thought of the food.

Ah yes, I neglected to update this copy of the post to acknowledge that explicitly. I'm definitely not referring to the authentic thing, which everyone who speaks about it says is a hard pass.

I take this opportunity to present: The Trade Theory of Ethnic Food Quality. The Trade Theory basically says that ethnic (or national, or whatever) food quality is mostly determined by historic access to trade routes, with more trade producing better food. The mechanism, of course, is that more trade provides both a wider variety of ingredients and more memetic spread of recipes, and selection pressure does the work from there.

The best food, therefore, is along the old silk road, and the parts of the Indian Ocean which benefit from predictable seasonal winds. In particular, based on my own experience, Uighur food is the clear winner of World's Best Ethnic Food, with Indian/Pakistani, Persian, and East African all generally strong contenders. Caribbean, central American, Eastern South American, and West African food all developed under more recent but very concentrated trade, and so also do very well. Mediterranean areas do reasonably well, though not on the same level as the silk road or Indian ocean areas.

On the flip side, historically-isolated places like Britain, Norway/Finnland/Sweden, or Japan have relatively shit food. (Yes, people will say Japan's great, but they're basically the neo-France: it's mostly simulacrum bullshit, France just stopped being cool and Japan has largely managed to fill that cultural niche among the younger generations.) Bland with a side of blandsauce.

Within the US itself, the trade theory also applies: best local-cultural-foods are in e.g. New York, New Orleans, Georgia; worst by far are in the midwest. (Also, midwesterners have notably terrible taste themselves, as they typically cannot handle any spice at all.) As with the pattern globally, the worst are characterized mostly by being utterly bland.

This theory has the nice benefit of being testable: since the proposed mechanism is mostly memetic spread + selection pressure, the theory predicts that the foods rated highly by the Trade Theory will tend (on average) to win out over time.

Shouldn't this imply that a country with a huge colonial empire (and the UK comes to mind) would have the best food?

Indeed! And the UK does indeed have great food today - they just call it "Indian food", not "British food". Same with the US - most of the US' food advantage is in the variety of available ethnic foods from other places.

One natural prediction in such situations is that the future will move towards mashups of the best ethnic foods from different places, and I definitely see plenty of that in the Bay Area. (For instance, Senor Sisig has been one of the most popular food trucks since I moved here 10 years ago, and they've been steadily expanding.)

French here.

Paris is an island in France, they are completely different from the rest of the country. We know it, they know it (and they want us to know it) and we don't like each others that much. Several of the experiences you talk about are typical parisian bullshit that would almost never happen elsewhere. About the "fancy" experience you describe, I'd say it's far from the majority and most restaurants would on the contrary be "à la bonne franquette" especially outside of Paris.

Really when you said this, I was thinking about 90% of my food experience in France, especially at home (but I'll come back to this later):

"What I love most about American food, and eating in America in general, is that it is the opposite of the French mistake of trying to impress you or waste your time. American food wants you to be happy, it wants to give you the experience you want and not hold back, it values your time and it does not much care how it looks doing it."

To come back to regional specialties, when you look for them you can have everything in Paris . I have to admit that. It may not be the easiest thing, especially for a stranger, but if you go outside of the touristic places you will find them and good food is worth searching for. I know there is a lot to visit in Paris and that may not be the priority but I feel like that's one of the reasons why strangers never actually eat typical french food.

There is no "french food" per se, the style of food completely changes from region to region and I feel like this is really what most people miss about it. Sure is easy to know about italian food, it's pizza, pasta and ice cream. French food is not that way, for better or for worse.

In my (limited, but still a few months) experience, americans rarely (if ever) eat home cooked food. For americans to eat at home, there is either a sports event that forces you to stay home or twice a year you will have people coming and make food. I have known couples who had four plates and that's it. All of this shocked me a bit and I honestly did not like it very much. Maybe it's bad luck but the sheer quantity of fast food (and extremely fat food in it) makes me doubt it. Did you try McDonald's in France? I could not believe how healthy it was actually compared to the american ones. (easiest comparison but it's the same in other fast foods)

We love our restaurants but cooking at home is a huge part of our food culture. If it takes the whole day to cook for friends and family, well it takes the whole day. The quality of the food we can buy in markets is way better than what I found in the US (the EU rules are much stricter) and many French become good cooks since they spend so much time in the kitchen so food at home is really really good.

In my (limited, but still a few months) experience, americans rarely (if ever) eat home cooked food.

This varies enormously. In my circle cooking is very common (I grew up eating almost all home cooking and my wife did too (though this wasn't part of our selection criteria), we cook ~every night now, many of my kids friends families do too) but I also know a lot of households who don't cook at all.

Seconding this characterization.

In my (limited, but still a few months) experience, americans rarely (if ever) eat home cooked food. For americans to eat at home, there is either a sports event that forces you to stay home or twice a year you will have people coming and make food. I have known couples who had four plates and that's it. All of this shocked me a bit and I honestly did not like it very much. Maybe it's bad luck but the sheer quantity of fast food (and extremely fat food in it) makes me doubt it

It's not bad luck, this is fairly common. I've discussed it with a number of people from many places. My own take is that the disaster of the 1950s made home cooking terrible, and caused us to lose most of the cooking knowledge our grandparents and great-grandparents had. Recovering it means a new generations has to learn on their own as adults instead of learning from their parents growing up, so most people never do. I grew up in a family in the food industry in NY and always loved to cook, so I feel like an outsider looking at much of my own country's food culture.

I'm going to Paris soon. Are there any specific places/parts of Paris you recommend visiting?

I live in the south so I won't be able to but my main advices would be to avoid eating near touristic places where very average stuff will be sold at a premium (Eiffel Tower, arc de triomphe for instance) and to go for places that look nice but not too fancy, especially if you want something closer to a "comfort food" feeling. Fancy places can have extremely good food but like Zvi said it, the ambiance can be mediocre and/or impersonal. Maybe ask parisians about the places where they would bring their friends for a good dinner? (and that you would like to try french specialties in some of them :) )

What does McDonald's sell in France?

Salads and pasta salads on the "healthy" side. There are a lot of vegetables in the burgers, almost no option with only meat in it.

But it's not so much that than the differences in portion sizes and calories. There are legal limits to added sugar, salt or fat and to how much calories you can put in a meal. It's way lower than what you can find in the US.

Unlimited sodas are forbidden in France(Europe maybe ?) + they have way less sugar than in the US (+they are even cut a bit more in fast foods) There must be a few other stuff but out of my head they are the main ones.

Despite that we still have obesity (~23% which is kind of average today but still bad)

Unlimited sodas are forbidden in France(Europe maybe ?)

They are legal (but rare) in Slovakia. I think IKEA has them at the restaurants they have in their shops.

they have way less sugar than in the US

I think this is more general than people realize. The food you buy under the same name and trademark in different countries is likely to be different, to comply with the local laws... or exploit their absence.

(I tried to google a half-forgotten example, but it is completely buried under tons of PR articles about how Coca Cola deeply cares about the purity of water in their products in India.)

Exactly, the quality rules in the EU sometimes feel too strict but a few weeks in the US and I saw the difference. The compounding effect of food on your health is huge.

You cannot go in with zero information, but if you know how to read Google Maps and are willing to consider several options, you can do very well overall, although many great places are still easy to miss.

How do you read Google Maps, beyond picking something with a high average star rating and (secondarily) large number of reviews? Since the vast majority of customers don't leave reviews, it seems like the star rating should be biased, but I'm not sure in what way or how to adjust for it.

Important question that could be its own post. The number is huge, the reviews give you important context where you want to look for people showing big upside and especially for those giving bad reviews WHY are they doing that? If the complaints are about non-food issues or aspects you don't care about then that is a very good sign and can make up for a lot. And you get pictures, which you learn to read, and access to the menu, etc.

I'd be interested in the full post!

British savoury food is poor. British desserts are maybe the best in the world: apple/rhubarb crumble, bakewell tart, summer pudding, sticky toffee pudding, Eton mess, steamed puddings, etc. Most cultures have fewer desserts and they're too sweet without enough tang. (Bias: I am a Brit.)

Most cultures have fewer desserts

This… seems wrong. It’s not true about American cuisine, it’s not true about Russian cuisine, it’s not true about Chinese cuisine…

EDIT: Indeed, I (with 25+ years baking / dessert-making) would say that British desserts are some of the worst in the world!

Australian here,

I think that survey data suffers from some major anchoring bias. I'm betting that most people just put numbers all around the same areas.

I only noticed this because I was surprised to see my culture listed and I don't think most people outside of Australia even know what Fairy Bread is, and probably think the term "Sausage Sizzle" sounds funny while never having been to a Bunnings. While we lay claim to the Meat Pie, I find it hard to back considering such a similar dish was served in the original globe theatre.

Stuff like Witchetty Grubs and Bush Tucker are probably illegal to serve in other countries. While many Australians eat Kangaroo, it's mostly dog food. Americans are often surprised to read the back of their dog food cans. It's not advertised that it's Roo to You. Croc is so rarely eaten. I've only had it once or twice.

Drinks wise, we've got great coffee and VB.

People famously hate Vegemite and no one knows what a Chiko Roll is.

Anyway, that was a culture rant. I hope someone learnt something about Australian food.

Meat pies without the capitalisation must go back to the UK...theres mince and onion, steak and ale, chicken and mushroom, game pie, gala pie, pork pies, Cornish pasties, scotch pies, etc.

Vegemite is of course Australian marmite.

I certainly did! I will say that the whole country has a population between those of Texas and Florida, and it's not like those places have well-developed diverse local cuisines! Some dishes and styles, sure, but that's all I'd really expect.

I've only spent a few weeks in Australia (Geelong and Melbourne), but I can say the meat pies were consistently excellent. 

And I'm glad someone informed me in advance that your tomato sauce is what Americans call ketchup.

I'm not really sure how useful this poll is to answer the title question of this post. Indeed, what is evaluated in each cell is the food labeled as "country A" in "country B", which may or may not be similar to what one would find in country A.

For example, let's consider the first row. It describes how much each country's version of italian cuisine is liked within said country, but may not reflect how much anyone would enjoy the food, were they to travel to italy. In particular, I wouldn't be surprised to see an italian traveling around the world, appalled or amused by what each country labels as italian food.

I wouldn't be surprised to see an italian traveling around the world, appalled or amused by what each country labels as italian food.

That is certainly true of "English" or "European" food as served in both Japan and India.

In particular, I wouldn't be surprised to see an italian traveling around the world, appalled or amused by what each country labels as italian food.

Indeed.

Actually, in Italy they take quite seriously every attempt to rebrand as "Italian" food from other countries (so-called "Italian Sounding"). My favorite anecdote related to this was a fake italian cheese sold in the US as "pecorino"... with a cow depicted on the wrapper, because they did't even know the meaning of "pecorino" (from "pecora", which means sheep).

I agree with your conclusion that America is #1, but where is the Eastern European (including Eastern European Jewish) food on this list? Jewish delis, Polish and Russian and Ukrainian restaurants… there’s plenty of those in NYC, at least. (I’m sure you’re familiar with Veselka, for example! And that’s just the famous one I know in Manhattan, never mind out here in Brooklyn/Queens.)

Also, Turkish food seems to be to be underrated, on that chart.

I've never been impressed by Turkish or seen what makes it unique, the places I've tried have been highly mid and there aren't many of them. Do you have a place in NYC you would recommend? 

As someone of Eastern European Jewish origin, there are a few things I think are great (e.g. Katz's Pastrami, or a good blintz) but I don't see the bench as deep and most explorations have been pretty terrible. The reputations are, as I understand it, quite bad. 

These are shocking statements, Zvi! I truly struggle to square these characterizations with my own experience and knowledge. Something has gone terribly wrong with your exploration of these cuisines, it seems to me, and I sincerely hope it can be remedied sooner rather than later, because you’re missing out on some of the most satisfying food available around here…

Turkish food should be understood as one particular (in my view, the superior) implementation of “Mediterranean food” more broadly, with some unique quirks. I recommend checking out the small but excellent Ay Kebab in Bay Ridge. Get the feta cheese rolls, the shepherd’s salad, the fried calf’s liver; and any of the yogurt kebabs, or the grilled branzini or salmon. For dessert, get the tiramisu (yes, really) or the pudding.

As far as Eastern European food goes, that is a larger discussion. You should understand this (as far as it is available to us in commercial form) to encompass three broad categories of dishes, which we might call “Ashkenazi cuisine”, “Slavic cuisine”, and “pan-Soviet cuisine”. (There is overlap between these, as you’ll see, but they are distinct clusters.)

Ashkenazi cuisine is your blintzes, matzoh ball soup, gefilte fish, latkes, and so on. The form in which some of these things have filtered to American commercial production is truly dire, I’m sad to say. I can’t speculate as to the causes of this failing, but it’s undeniable. I can say quite a lot about what the elements of this cuisine should be like (my grandmother having been a master of what I take to be right way to do it), but I don’t think that you can find this sort of thing done well in restaurant form (pastrami sandwiches are hardly representative, however delicious they might be), so we can set this aside for now.

Slavic cuisine is the sort of thing you’ll find (though at typically exorbitant Manhattan prices) in the aforementioned Veselka. This category, as you’ll find it represented here, mostly means Ukrainian and Polish food. Chris’s Restaurant in Bensonhurst, a cozy little Polish place, is my favorite local example. Skip the borscht if you go to such a place (it’s never as good as homemade); instead, get things like the pierogis / vareniki / etc. (dumplings), anything involving sausage, any of the meat or fish dishes… and the blintzes, of course. This is satisfying, filling food, with no nonsense: the focus is on the carbs, fat, cheese, and meat.

Finally, pan-Soviet cuisine is a category that roughly encompasses “the sort of food an average Soviet citizen would be familiar with”. (There are caveats to that description, but it gives the right idea.) This includes elements of traditionally Russian/Ukrainian food, as well as elements of the cuisines of the other Soviet republics, to the extent that they were popularized in the USSR broadly (such as plov or shashlyk), as well as things that were popular in the Soviet Union for essentially contingent reasons, like Olivier salad. My restaurant recommendation here would be Vanka in Sheepshead Bay. Get the crepes with red caviar, the pelmeni (meat dumplings) Siberian style, homestyle potatoes with mushrooms; the grilled salmon in white sauce, chicken Kiev, any of the shish-kebabs.

"Italy. Here is a country with no economy, no military, no law and order, no hope, no future - but damn good food."

Peruvian food is pretty great, so I'm gonna say that chart just isn't very useful.

I was pretty surprised that Peru was so low, as I assumed it was generally recognised as an excellent cuisine. But a lot of the ordering seems to match my understanding of the world, so something strange must be going on with Peru. 

It probably has to do with the sample "people who have tried the cuisine in that country", but don't know why that would apply to Peru. It would make sense that, say, Saudi/ Emirati cuisine are under-rated, as the majority of visitors probably just grab an overpriced meal at the airport or in a mall during a stopover. 

I was also surprised to see it so low.

An interesting data point. I live in the UK. Several of my work colleagues are from Italy. One informed me (and the other one present agreed) that food variety n the UK was much better than it Italy. They said that, in their home town you could get the local specialties at high quality, but you couldn't easily get dishes associated even with other parts of Italy. In contrast they felt that in the UK their was Indian/Chinese/etc and lots of variety. I assume the US is similar in this regard.

This comparison seems kind of unfair. I bet that the city where your workplace is located, if it's not London, is still significantly bigger than the home town of your colleagues. It's not that difficult to find variety in large Italian towns.

That said, it's true that food is a huge part of the Italian culture, and the reason why most small towns have approximately zero ethnic restaurants is that the locals won't eat there in the first place. The YouGov data here are probably quite right: 99% of Italians do like Italian food, and they like it quite a lot (note that no other square in the table has such a high value: 99% manages to beat even the lizardmen constant).

The only Italian that I ever met who complained about food in his home town was a vegan from a town where all the traditional specialties are meat-based. He claimed that several restaurants outright refused to serve him anything at all (which kind of proves your point, but again, the median Italian is very fond of the traditional specialties). I strongly suspect that similar cases make up the majority of that 1% who claims to not like Italian food.

On the other hand, even the smallest of small towns in the UK has a wide variety of ethnic food. I think pretty much anywhere with a restaurant has a Chinese and an Indian, and usually a lot more.

Yes, I considered this point. It is an unfair comparison to an extent, and actually made this point during the conversation. I was assured by the Italian that they did not think it was that unfair, that their home town was not much smaller than the place of our workplace.

This whole post seems to mostly be answering "who has the best ethnic restaurants in Europe/America?" along with "which country has the best variety of good restaurants?" and not "who has the best food?" I think that's an important distinction. Clearly, Indian, Chinese, and middle eastern foods are the best.

Only China and Thailand have it lower than America, and I am guessing that opinion is mostly not about the food.

Small comment- I'm sure it is mostly about the food. Almost every time I've tried Indian cuisine with Chinese people, they make the same comments about the unfamiliar and strange spices. 

The perceptions of hygiene/ racism might play a small role, but Chinese people do enjoy some Indian snacks (you get Manda Roti at some tourist locations), so it seems much more parsimonious to me that it's mostly about the flavours.

Indian provides a unique set of flavors and experiences, done mediocre it is fine and done well it is very good. Only China and Thailand have it lower than America, and I am guessing that opinion is mostly not about the food.

According to the chart above, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Spain, Indonesia, Thailand, and China have it lower than America.

I think you greatly overestimate how much of America has options better than Olive Garden and Applebee's. I travel full time, and in most states and cities...not so much. Plus, Olive Garden itself is substantially better outside the NY metro area and other major cities. Not great, but very noticeably better. Part of me wonders if there's some pool of good restaurant cooking talent that would never work there in NY, but might in Tucson or Rapid City. It has also undergone The Upgrade since the one time I went in the 1990s, to the point that in a large number of places the reliable chain is a better bet than the possibly-fantastic-but-more-often-overrated local joints. 

And for Italian specifically the greater NY area (all the way to Philly, really) is an extremely clear outlier. For example, I know of only a handful of places in the entire greater Boston metro area that have pasta better than I can get at a slightly-above-average pizzeria on Long Island. And basically nowhere that has pizza that good or better. And almost all of the rest of the country is worse.

Otherwise, pretty much completely agreed on all counts.

I really enjoy Moroccan food and surprised to see it rated so poorly (I've mostly encountered it while living in France though and it seems that French do actually like it, so maybe there is something special about how its presented there vs elsewhere 🤔)

pain

Bread in the neck?


Disclaimer: I'm Filipino, and I find this post intriguing.

The chart seems to contradict many of the compliments I've heard in general. While it's true that some places are terrible for finding authentic Filipino cuisine, trying to encapsulate all food choices in a single chart is inherently difficult.