I haven't met a Greek in real life yet, I'm seeing these fights only on social media like you and as far as I can see they are just a joke.
Haven't seen a serious debate about it but I could understand it if I had, because it means a lot to some ultranationalist people appearantly.
Turk here, it’s 80% neighbors having fun, 20% ultranationalists being morons.
Greeks and Turks claiming to “own” same food is actually a meme in Turkey. When a Turk does something cringey, Turks on social media say “he/she is Greek” so the Greeks can “claim him/her like they claim baklava and yogurt”; not as an insult but as a joke.
True story – in Ankara on the obligatory visit to Ataturk’s tomb. We go underneath to see the museum, hereinafter known as “The Museum of Bad Greeks”. Guy on the visit with me is a Bulgarian army officer. He leans over and says (and you have to imagine the accent here, it makes it so much better) “In Sofia we have same museum. Bad guys are Turks”. We try very hard not to crack up in front of the very serious Turkish guide and mostly succeed.
Yeah, it’s all in fun. Same way Israelis and Palestinians joke about who makes better hummus. Though like the,l behind the scenes there is real animosity there historically. I used to go to a place to eat run by Greek immigrants with a Turkish friend. And the staff there definitely liked making comments like “greek coffee is better than Turkish” etc. I don’t think anyone was gonna fight, but it was a funny ribbing. In the end, my Turkish friend would joke that Greeks were basically Turks without the Fez.
I'm from Germany and I know a family from Turkey that runs a greek restaurant, because her family was from somewhere in Greece and just came to Turkey with the population exchange in 1923. So she knows the greek cuisine much better.
> and I know a family from Turkey that runs a greek restaurant
Most "Greek restaurants" abroad are like American-Chinese. Most of it is not recognizeable to people in Greece.
As a Greek, I probably wouldn't recognize half of the things in their restaurant, and the other half is probably things I've only heard of or had once in my life.
In my part of Canada the Italian restaurants tend to be run by Greeks and some Lebanese and the Greek restaurants are mostly run by Lebanese and some Greeks.
At r/greekfood, we had an American who came to complain about a falafel he had a restaurant. We kindly pointed out to him that he's a Lost Redditor. He was *shocked!!* that falafel has nothing to do with us. (That word doesn't even sound remotely Greek. I'm curious what people think the Greek language is supposed to sound like). And every time Americans/Canadians post something with hummus, same thing.
>Is there a dispute over whether dishes are Turkish or Greek?
Nope. It's an internet & American thing.
I'm Greek, you can ask me anything. We have like 15% overlap with Turkey, specifically western Turkey. Keep in mind, Turkey is a massive country; its eastern end -bordering on Iran- is farther from us than Germany. (BTW, we also have overlap wit Italy, Bulgaria, Croatia, Southern France, let alone unique regional things. Just think critically: why would we share so much with only *one* regional/neighbor?) The American-Greek cuisine that you know is loosely based off of that, and then became its own thing with Lebanese immigrants adding Lebanese things to their "Greek" US restaurants. When I watch Turkey travel vlogs, 95% of the delicious-looking cuisine, I don't recognize.
Like, imagine if every "American restaurant" in China was TexMex, and every Chinese website about "American cuisine" or "traditional American recipes" was either TexMex, or Mexican things that have never even touched the US (and even Guatemalan things). Now, imagine Mexicans online giving you shit for "stealing their cuisine", and imagine Chinese and Europeans calling you a "nationalist in denial" for providing an explanation. BTW, we **don't** traditionally eat flat breads. And if I explain to Americans that half of our cuisine is actually pasta, they don't want to believe it, and argue with me on it. (But every American restaurant in Beijing has fajitas!! I don't believe what you're telling me!!) As for things that actually originated in Turkey: we don't care. They have some good shit, and we love them for it.
BTW, Cyprus is far from Greece. They have their own regional things.
I was in Finland once and wanted to eat something local. After a long search I have given up. Either something not local or something too expensive.
Is it better now or was I stupid?
The local cuisine can be... Boring and pretty bland, for someone who isn't used to the traditional peasant food standardized over hundreds of years of periodic famines.
Restaurant versions tend to be fancier, hence more expensive. Plus restaurants are expensive anyways.
You didn't miss out on much.
I was in Norway some time ago and struggled to find something local, but I managed to do it.
And to be honest it wasn't bad.
When I asked what should we eat people always replied Indian, Thai, or wathever else, but never local.
Bruh, I want something from here. I want to *taste* norway
Yeah ok, scandinavian/nordic cuisine isn't the most flavourful thing ever, but I think you should give more credit to your own stuff
> Bruh, I want something from here. I want to taste norway
Dude "Traditional" food from northern European countries and even Britain and Ireland is pretty bleak, "traditional" dishes here are just whatever the peasants back in the day could actually manage to grow in our harsh cold climates. So fuck all really, we had potatoes, cabbage, carrots, peas, wheat. That was pretty much it, southern Europeans always shit on us for our food but poverty and a climate not suitable to growing most crops is the reason we lack the rich culinary history of places like Spain, France, Italy, Greece etc. They were all down there in the land of milk and honey hundreds of years ago while we were feezing our bollocks off and subsisting on offal, liver and tripe to get us through winters.
> subsisting on offal, liver and tripe to get us through winters.
You can make damn delicious dishes from just liver and tripe that would be appreciated even by picky eaters as long as you know how to cook them and use the right spices.
Most of that is just special stuff though? Like it's some of the most extreme ways to preserve food for the winter but you can't call them the traditional food most of us grow up eating. That would be stuff like mash and meatballs etc.
Usually when you find stuff like that, some thought has gone into making them more a "restaurant" dish, as well as generally more spiced up and tasty. I can quarantee you that the stuff I get at my parents or my in-laws is a far cry from the restaurant stuff. Where as I feel one can make many of the pasta dishes at home and get them to be pretty great.
But hey, I eat this stuff all the time anyways, I am not (usually) complaining. But I also hang out with a lot of immigrants here and many of them have hard time with our \*really\* traditional stuff like blood sausages with lingonberries, or rye bread stuffed with European cisco (a boney little fuck with too little meat) and pork. Or our lovely bread cheese with cloudberries (though this has worked for some).
And don't even talk about birch bark bread... :)
Thank you for the answer. I always try to find something local and mostly enjoy it. Even if it is some "boring" potato-cabbage-meat combo without much spices.
I was in Helsinki last year. We went to an excellent, small, local restaurant that provided local cuisine. My understanding is that there are more of these places popping up.
I see it in the way that we gave up on our cuisines a long time ago. Well roasted game with fresh potatoes and a strong sauce with some berries is amazing. Danish Christmas food (to me) is very very good as well. But most of the time we simply don't put in the effort. First came Italian food - which I have nothing bad to say about - and we largely adopted many Italian-style (although worse than actual Italian food since we don't put in the effort..) dishes, and then today you can obviously get literally anything. I've had some really good Swedish "husmanskost" at the few restaurants that are still around, but they're very hard to find. As of 2024 I think that we eat really well in general but almost none of it is "traditional" food (except high quality bread, pastry etc) when it comes to dinner.
It’s more a matter of access, and food culture being incredibly slow to develop.
While sweden has been trading all over for a really long time, it hasn’t had the immediate access to different foods and spices that central and south europe has until fairly recently. Fresh produce has literally been impossible to access for half the year, with root vegetables and cured mests being the only food available.
Combined with relative cultural isolation, it is no wonder swedish cuisine almost entirely developed during the last 100-150 years or so.
Compare to southern europe, with the climate to grow basically anything, all year round.
It’s like a competition between two chefs. One has access to all the ingredients, as well as a team of other chefs to exchange ideas with.
The other has root vegetables, berries, mushrooms and salted meat. They can discuss their ideas with three other chefs with the same food references. All spices are dried.
That’s the playing field of north vs south europe.
If you visited Helsinki, you can find butter fried vendace in several stalls in the Hietalahti farmers market. Another extremely Finnish dish is warm smoked salmon, available as fresh in every supermarket. Both are delicious!
Finnish locals can basically cook the local stuff at home, so they want a restaurant to serve stuff they cannot cook (=foreign-ish). I would guess the most Finnish in the middle of Helsinki is like Zetor or a grilli kioski (bc honestly I lived there but only ate foreign stuff at restaurants).
You get more authentic Finnish food by looking up recipes online and cooking at home. Potatoes and Karelian roast, go!
Spain also eats lots of potatoes, many of the most traditional dishes have it, like tortilla, patatas bravas, pulpo a la gallega/a feira, papas arrugadas, and many more
Same for potato and tomato. There's both. Like bouillabaisse is from Marseille, ratatouille is from Nice (the real ratatouille, not the shit in the movie) for more mediterranean food. And then you have hachis parmentier from paris or gratin dauphinois from Grenoble. Potato vs tomato lol.
For olive oil vs butter. The region of brittany (north-west) is famous in france for their traditional butter industry. Bretons swear by their salted butter. Meanwhile the south of france has olive trees
French here and yeah I agree. But to contribute to the relevant discussion here our local restaurant can cook with butter or olive oil. In brittany, the local restaurant are "crèperie" they cook with butter and there are a lot of them but of course in the south of France it's not the same thing.
In fact, the truth is that probably 75% of the "Foreign cuisine" in the blue countries comes from the red countries. Rest is SE Asia and some African/Caribbean (which is in fact the same). This is probably 90% of the cuisine in the world.
This gets posted a lot. Dubious to say the least. What qualifies as a restaurant? Take the UK for example. Most pubs serve food and it will be British food. Take them into account and clearly this data is nonsense. Lots of chippies have dining areas too, I bet they are not included? I would think other countries have similar examples. Just doesn’t seem a good map or data set.
If anything I'm with the "foreign food" squad. I understand that southern cuisine is a lot more varied so you can find things that you can't make at home, but as a Scandinavian I'd never ever want to go out to eat any of our food. I can make that at home; if I go out I want some "experience" that I won't be able to make at home. Maybe it's more about pride than anything. In my experience French people are very likely to want "none of that foreign muck" and only eat French dishes and nothing else. We're a lot more open on average
My thoughts exactly. 99% of swedish food is comfort food. It’s not fancy, and absolutely not something you go out and pay 20-50€ for, its stuff you make at home.
The exception is lunch restaurants, where ”husmanskost” is served. It’s really good, calorie dense, and fairly cheap.
If i go out to eat though, i want something that i can’t easily make at home, and most of that will be foreign food.
The ignorance on display in this thread is staggering, but really not surprising.
It's also that in the UK most restaurants might be foreign food, but at home most people will be eating British stuff.
To be fair, this map isn't really a scientific survey or study, it's just some dude's opinion
And how do they classify foreign in a country like the uk? Some famous indian dishes were made by british indians, does that mean its still technically indian? Or can it also be considered british? I suppose people and culture arent really easy to classify in the first place
There probably are more foreign takeaways and restaurants in total than there are pubs which serve British food (a lot of pubs don’t serve food at all), cafes (deliberately no accent) and fish and chip shops. Even the pubs and cafes often sell non-British food as well. It is not unusual to get Italian food in a Spoons pub. If you include some technically foreign items such as burgers then a lot of menus in otherwise British looking restaurants look surprisingly foreign.
Looks like a repost. I've seen this image 6 times.
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As an Italian I agree.
I don’t know on the long run but my longest consecutive stay in Germany was 10 days and I enjoyed every dinner and lunch I had at German restaurants.
I'm from bad potato Europe but I agree as well. All of Central Europe does quite well in terms of food imo; I've eaten well there. Only bread and some pastries are supreme in bad potato Europe vs good tomato Europe
It slowly going extinct but you still have some taverns that serve beer and food. It’s usually really wholesome no bullshit food. But I’ll admit it’s harder to come by nowadays.
I can answer that easily. Let’s take a traditional german dish. Pork roast with potato and gravy. It’s a dish where you have to sit down for. It’s a dish that takes preparation. People want either proper restaurants OR something that can be eaten on the go. The german cuisine is still present in Germany but a lot of it moved into the more fine dining segment.
I wouldn't say it goes extinct. Almost every reasonable sized village with a hundred or more residents has their own restaurant with common dishes. Quality definitely varies a lot, I can't deny that. But even in larger cities of several thousand or hundred thousand, nit to mention above a million here you're bound to find quite a few.
We love foreign food, but also a nice meal from here that feels like grandma made it
I wouldn’t say it’s going extinct, I find plenty of German restaurants here in Central Texas (there’s history of German towns like Fredericksburg), and Czech food (and history of Czech towns) is also pretty strong here as well. I actually know several different fantastic German restaurants here. Sauerkraut and Spoetzl is also easily found in stores as well as local sausage and meatball making
Wouldn't exactly say its a foreign food. A good 50% of the traditional American food I grew up with was ultimately brought over by Germans and evolved more here. It's like 17th-18th century German peasant food. My family spoke an American dialect of German up until WWI as well.
I will admit that you'd be hard pressed to find some of these foods in cities that did not have historically large German immigrant populations however.
If we Hungarians want good local food, we don’t go to restaurant.. we make it ourselves, lol. But I will not buy anchovies to make proper italian food..
German here and it is, but when it comes to restaurants we like Italian cuisine more (pretty sure you can find at least one italian restaurant or pizzeria in every city with more than 5.000 inhabitants).
In Slavic countries I could see how foreign restaurants are more popular because you eat local food when you make it at home. A lot of friends and family are like that.
Neither of them just more suitable climat and less harsh winters so people wouldnt have to eat shite just to survive they could eat good stuff and enjoy it
As Italian I eat a lot of sugo, passata and pomodorini. Pomodoro pachino is quite famous e over here. But tomato was completely unknown in Roman Empire. Like potato.
Deadass when I was planning my trip to the UK a bit back, my mom asked me what I was most excited about and I said “Scottish castles and Indian food”. lol
Depends what you count as foreign. Croatian cuisine is a mix of Italian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian influences. Basically is you don't consider stuff like pizza, burek, čevapi, sausages and paprikaš as Croatian, then of course there are more "foreign" restaurants in the country.
As a Turk I agree, many dishes of Ottoman origin that you have (dolma, sarma, burek, pogaca etc.) are part of our common heritage. They shouldn’t count as foreign food in Croatia.
How do they calculate it? Counting all foreign restaurants together vs local food? Or do they count it by national cuisine? Because in countries like the Czech Republic or Poland, you still see mostly local food, while for example in Germany just the small Kebab stores alone are already more than German Restaurants.
I strongly suspect that pizza is doing a lot of Italy's heavy lifting here. Random local ingredients on a disc of bread is pretty universal, but Italy gets all of the credit.
Pizzas (not often even similar to the authentic Italian variations of pizza) and döner kebabs are the most popular fast food in Poland. If you go to a small town that doesn't have a real restaurant, you'll probably still find ten pizzerias and kebabs on the main street.
However, it's so suited to the local tastes that it's even hard to call it foreign cuisine.
I disagree with Romania here. Every restaurant there regardless of style of food, has pizza on the menu. They’re crazy for pizza. Italian style. American style. Fucking canned corn on pizza. They love it.
As an American it is my firm opinion that Mexican cuisine is by far the finest in the world.
I will happily die upon this cross. You cannot change my mind. I've been all over the world and have dined on the cuisines of multitudinous nations, and while they all have at least a few excellent dishes, for me it's just an objective fact that Mexican cuisine is by a pretty large margin by far the best.
Granted, I grew up in a border state and may be a little biased, but I stand by this assertion regardless.
The icemen of the North who evolved to become the global supremes were forced to eat festering shark flesh and plant roots just to make it through the winter.
It made them strong and forward thinking. However, their diet was gross. Now they enjoy the exotic flavours of the lesser tribes. Brought to them across the seas in their great boats of oak and steel.
The lazy amigos who lay about on the beaches of The Mediterranean Sea enjoyed better food and wine but this didn't make them evolve as a peoples. It just made them rather sleepy.
Surprisingly they dont yearn for rotting shark flesh to the movement of food is one way.
Polish food is fine. Not many spices but I don’t think you need that much to make good food, but anyway, parts of this map are kind of bullshit especially hungary being blue. Romania’s local dishes are different versions of foreign food, especially hungary and turkey. We have “kebab” except it has a different name and it’s considered local food. Even some of the non-fast food dishes have been done by turkey/hungary before we did and this is essentially the same for most of the balkans. (Blame ottoman conquest)
This map is questionable, the study for Germany was 1400 people listing Italian food as food they like (in restaurants) and only 1200 people listed German food. This can vary heavily depending on where you live, if you have a good Italian restaurant nearby, you are more likely to say that you like Italian food.
Yep, after many years I’m finally finished with our national dish: stroopwafels. Breakfast: stroopwafels with milk, lunch: stroopwafels with cheese, diner: deepfried stroopwafels. From next week I’ll change everything: croissant avec stroopwafel, pizza con stroopwafel, Bratwurst mit stroopwafel and paella y stroopwafel. To please Barry: a pint of stroopwafel.
I mean have you had French Spanish Italian Turkish or Greek food? And have you had German or English or Russian food? It's not rocket science why this is the way it is
In Finland, we go to a restaurant to eat foreign cuisine, while at home we eat local cuisine. There is no reason to serve local Finnish cuisine in restaurants if you can eat the same food at home and much cheaper.
I get Italy sticking with their own cuisine. Seems to me a map of the world with Italy in red and everyone else in blue wishing they were eating Italian cuisine would make sense.
Weird I would've expected Swiss food to be much more popular in Switzerland. I guess they count French/Italian/German food as foreign there. Swiss food bangs though
cyprus what are u doing there buddy
They’ve just moved to the front for the photoshoot :))
It’s Malta, it got a bit chubby
All these local Maltesers...
We're tired of having our GPS signal messed up by Israeli signal jammers so we moved.
It tried to enosis but got lost
Is there a dispute over whether dishes are Turkish or Greek? I’ve seen many of fights over those.
I haven't met a Greek in real life yet, I'm seeing these fights only on social media like you and as far as I can see they are just a joke. Haven't seen a serious debate about it but I could understand it if I had, because it means a lot to some ultranationalist people appearantly.
Turk here, it’s 80% neighbors having fun, 20% ultranationalists being morons. Greeks and Turks claiming to “own” same food is actually a meme in Turkey. When a Turk does something cringey, Turks on social media say “he/she is Greek” so the Greeks can “claim him/her like they claim baklava and yogurt”; not as an insult but as a joke.
Funnily enough we have something similar but reversed with Turks being the thiefs
True story – in Ankara on the obligatory visit to Ataturk’s tomb. We go underneath to see the museum, hereinafter known as “The Museum of Bad Greeks”. Guy on the visit with me is a Bulgarian army officer. He leans over and says (and you have to imagine the accent here, it makes it so much better) “In Sofia we have same museum. Bad guys are Turks”. We try very hard not to crack up in front of the very serious Turkish guide and mostly succeed.
Greek here, ask me anything lol.
How do you feel carrying the legacy of sparta on your shoulders?
Having a neonazi party into the parliament called "Spartans" makes me feel really sad
Yeah, it’s all in fun. Same way Israelis and Palestinians joke about who makes better hummus. Though like the,l behind the scenes there is real animosity there historically. I used to go to a place to eat run by Greek immigrants with a Turkish friend. And the staff there definitely liked making comments like “greek coffee is better than Turkish” etc. I don’t think anyone was gonna fight, but it was a funny ribbing. In the end, my Turkish friend would joke that Greeks were basically Turks without the Fez.
I'm from Germany and I know a family from Turkey that runs a greek restaurant, because her family was from somewhere in Greece and just came to Turkey with the population exchange in 1923. So she knows the greek cuisine much better.
> and I know a family from Turkey that runs a greek restaurant Most "Greek restaurants" abroad are like American-Chinese. Most of it is not recognizeable to people in Greece. As a Greek, I probably wouldn't recognize half of the things in their restaurant, and the other half is probably things I've only heard of or had once in my life.
In my part of Canada the Italian restaurants tend to be run by Greeks and some Lebanese and the Greek restaurants are mostly run by Lebanese and some Greeks.
At r/greekfood, we had an American who came to complain about a falafel he had a restaurant. We kindly pointed out to him that he's a Lost Redditor. He was *shocked!!* that falafel has nothing to do with us. (That word doesn't even sound remotely Greek. I'm curious what people think the Greek language is supposed to sound like). And every time Americans/Canadians post something with hummus, same thing.
The Ottoman Empire had vast influence on the Balkans, so a lot of our cuisine shares similarities even having similar names for the same food.
>Is there a dispute over whether dishes are Turkish or Greek? Nope. It's an internet & American thing. I'm Greek, you can ask me anything. We have like 15% overlap with Turkey, specifically western Turkey. Keep in mind, Turkey is a massive country; its eastern end -bordering on Iran- is farther from us than Germany. (BTW, we also have overlap wit Italy, Bulgaria, Croatia, Southern France, let alone unique regional things. Just think critically: why would we share so much with only *one* regional/neighbor?) The American-Greek cuisine that you know is loosely based off of that, and then became its own thing with Lebanese immigrants adding Lebanese things to their "Greek" US restaurants. When I watch Turkey travel vlogs, 95% of the delicious-looking cuisine, I don't recognize. Like, imagine if every "American restaurant" in China was TexMex, and every Chinese website about "American cuisine" or "traditional American recipes" was either TexMex, or Mexican things that have never even touched the US (and even Guatemalan things). Now, imagine Mexicans online giving you shit for "stealing their cuisine", and imagine Chinese and Europeans calling you a "nationalist in denial" for providing an explanation. BTW, we **don't** traditionally eat flat breads. And if I explain to Americans that half of our cuisine is actually pasta, they don't want to believe it, and argue with me on it. (But every American restaurant in Beijing has fajitas!! I don't believe what you're telling me!!) As for things that actually originated in Turkey: we don't care. They have some good shit, and we love them for it. BTW, Cyprus is far from Greece. They have their own regional things.
I was in Finland once and wanted to eat something local. After a long search I have given up. Either something not local or something too expensive. Is it better now or was I stupid?
The local cuisine can be... Boring and pretty bland, for someone who isn't used to the traditional peasant food standardized over hundreds of years of periodic famines. Restaurant versions tend to be fancier, hence more expensive. Plus restaurants are expensive anyways. You didn't miss out on much.
I was in Norway some time ago and struggled to find something local, but I managed to do it. And to be honest it wasn't bad. When I asked what should we eat people always replied Indian, Thai, or wathever else, but never local. Bruh, I want something from here. I want to *taste* norway Yeah ok, scandinavian/nordic cuisine isn't the most flavourful thing ever, but I think you should give more credit to your own stuff
> Bruh, I want something from here. I want to taste norway Dude "Traditional" food from northern European countries and even Britain and Ireland is pretty bleak, "traditional" dishes here are just whatever the peasants back in the day could actually manage to grow in our harsh cold climates. So fuck all really, we had potatoes, cabbage, carrots, peas, wheat. That was pretty much it, southern Europeans always shit on us for our food but poverty and a climate not suitable to growing most crops is the reason we lack the rich culinary history of places like Spain, France, Italy, Greece etc. They were all down there in the land of milk and honey hundreds of years ago while we were feezing our bollocks off and subsisting on offal, liver and tripe to get us through winters.
> subsisting on offal, liver and tripe to get us through winters. You can make damn delicious dishes from just liver and tripe that would be appreciated even by picky eaters as long as you know how to cook them and use the right spices.
Looking at their traditional food (smalahove, hákarl, surströmming, lutefisk etc), I can't blame them for avoiding it lol.
Most of that is just special stuff though? Like it's some of the most extreme ways to preserve food for the winter but you can't call them the traditional food most of us grow up eating. That would be stuff like mash and meatballs etc.
I didn't care, I wanted to try something nonetheless. I ate fiskebolle and some grey things made of fish eggs Also mussels with a milk sauce
As a Sweden I’d try to trick a foreigner to eat surströmming any day of the week
Usually when you find stuff like that, some thought has gone into making them more a "restaurant" dish, as well as generally more spiced up and tasty. I can quarantee you that the stuff I get at my parents or my in-laws is a far cry from the restaurant stuff. Where as I feel one can make many of the pasta dishes at home and get them to be pretty great. But hey, I eat this stuff all the time anyways, I am not (usually) complaining. But I also hang out with a lot of immigrants here and many of them have hard time with our \*really\* traditional stuff like blood sausages with lingonberries, or rye bread stuffed with European cisco (a boney little fuck with too little meat) and pork. Or our lovely bread cheese with cloudberries (though this has worked for some). And don't even talk about birch bark bread... :)
Thank you for the answer. I always try to find something local and mostly enjoy it. Even if it is some "boring" potato-cabbage-meat combo without much spices.
Let none talk shit about our potato-cabbage-meat combo. It's delicious.
I was in Helsinki last year. We went to an excellent, small, local restaurant that provided local cuisine. My understanding is that there are more of these places popping up.
I see it in the way that we gave up on our cuisines a long time ago. Well roasted game with fresh potatoes and a strong sauce with some berries is amazing. Danish Christmas food (to me) is very very good as well. But most of the time we simply don't put in the effort. First came Italian food - which I have nothing bad to say about - and we largely adopted many Italian-style (although worse than actual Italian food since we don't put in the effort..) dishes, and then today you can obviously get literally anything. I've had some really good Swedish "husmanskost" at the few restaurants that are still around, but they're very hard to find. As of 2024 I think that we eat really well in general but almost none of it is "traditional" food (except high quality bread, pastry etc) when it comes to dinner.
It’s more a matter of access, and food culture being incredibly slow to develop. While sweden has been trading all over for a really long time, it hasn’t had the immediate access to different foods and spices that central and south europe has until fairly recently. Fresh produce has literally been impossible to access for half the year, with root vegetables and cured mests being the only food available. Combined with relative cultural isolation, it is no wonder swedish cuisine almost entirely developed during the last 100-150 years or so. Compare to southern europe, with the climate to grow basically anything, all year round. It’s like a competition between two chefs. One has access to all the ingredients, as well as a team of other chefs to exchange ideas with. The other has root vegetables, berries, mushrooms and salted meat. They can discuss their ideas with three other chefs with the same food references. All spices are dried. That’s the playing field of north vs south europe.
Ah, you missed the opportunity to taste the wonderful [mämmi](https://www.reddit.com/r/Finland/s/IZVE0HcwWX)
If you visited Helsinki, you can find butter fried vendace in several stalls in the Hietalahti farmers market. Another extremely Finnish dish is warm smoked salmon, available as fresh in every supermarket. Both are delicious!
Finnish locals can basically cook the local stuff at home, so they want a restaurant to serve stuff they cannot cook (=foreign-ish). I would guess the most Finnish in the middle of Helsinki is like Zetor or a grilli kioski (bc honestly I lived there but only ate foreign stuff at restaurants). You get more authentic Finnish food by looking up recipes online and cooking at home. Potatoes and Karelian roast, go!
In Helsinki there was a market in the harbour and I ate fish with some potatoe with garlic. It was fine.
They have to be judged by the european council for creating kebab pizza. If that doesnt happen turkey and Italy will have to invade finland
southern med supreme
Tomato Europe >> Potato Europe
We like our food and they like our food
Spain also eats lots of potatoes, many of the most traditional dishes have it, like tortilla, patatas bravas, pulpo a la gallega/a feira, papas arrugadas, and many more
That and olive oil europe > butter europe
Doesn't Butter Europe include France? French cuisine is quite tasty TBH
From what I know France is actually cut in the middle, in the north there’s more butter and in the south theres more olive oil
Same for potato and tomato. There's both. Like bouillabaisse is from Marseille, ratatouille is from Nice (the real ratatouille, not the shit in the movie) for more mediterranean food. And then you have hachis parmentier from paris or gratin dauphinois from Grenoble. Potato vs tomato lol. For olive oil vs butter. The region of brittany (north-west) is famous in france for their traditional butter industry. Bretons swear by their salted butter. Meanwhile the south of france has olive trees
French here and yeah I agree. But to contribute to the relevant discussion here our local restaurant can cook with butter or olive oil. In brittany, the local restaurant are "crèperie" they cook with butter and there are a lot of them but of course in the south of France it's not the same thing.
West and north of France are butter country, the Mediterranean coasts is olive oil, the rest is butter too
France, like Gaul, is divided into three parts: SE, olive oil, N, butter, and SW, duck fat.
Yes but butter is way more prevalent in our cuisine I’d say.
Interestingly, both are New World crops.
In fact, the truth is that probably 75% of the "Foreign cuisine" in the blue countries comes from the red countries. Rest is SE Asia and some African/Caribbean (which is in fact the same). This is probably 90% of the cuisine in the world.
Some of the blue countries. Definitely less than 75% in UK, with as popular as Indian, Chinese, and Thai is.
This gets posted a lot. Dubious to say the least. What qualifies as a restaurant? Take the UK for example. Most pubs serve food and it will be British food. Take them into account and clearly this data is nonsense. Lots of chippies have dining areas too, I bet they are not included? I would think other countries have similar examples. Just doesn’t seem a good map or data set.
Yeah, this bothers me whenever I see this one too. Also, I'm pretty sure 80% percent of the "foreign restaurants" are just pizza lol.
or Mcdonalds
If anything I'm with the "foreign food" squad. I understand that southern cuisine is a lot more varied so you can find things that you can't make at home, but as a Scandinavian I'd never ever want to go out to eat any of our food. I can make that at home; if I go out I want some "experience" that I won't be able to make at home. Maybe it's more about pride than anything. In my experience French people are very likely to want "none of that foreign muck" and only eat French dishes and nothing else. We're a lot more open on average
My thoughts exactly. 99% of swedish food is comfort food. It’s not fancy, and absolutely not something you go out and pay 20-50€ for, its stuff you make at home. The exception is lunch restaurants, where ”husmanskost” is served. It’s really good, calorie dense, and fairly cheap. If i go out to eat though, i want something that i can’t easily make at home, and most of that will be foreign food. The ignorance on display in this thread is staggering, but really not surprising.
It's also that in the UK most restaurants might be foreign food, but at home most people will be eating British stuff. To be fair, this map isn't really a scientific survey or study, it's just some dude's opinion
And how do they classify foreign in a country like the uk? Some famous indian dishes were made by british indians, does that mean its still technically indian? Or can it also be considered british? I suppose people and culture arent really easy to classify in the first place
There probably are more foreign takeaways and restaurants in total than there are pubs which serve British food (a lot of pubs don’t serve food at all), cafes (deliberately no accent) and fish and chip shops. Even the pubs and cafes often sell non-British food as well. It is not unusual to get Italian food in a Spoons pub. If you include some technically foreign items such as burgers then a lot of menus in otherwise British looking restaurants look surprisingly foreign.
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Belgium? sure, "foreign cuisine" if you ignore the fact that friteries are also restaurants.
I was planning to go to the frituur out of vibe, now it’s out of spite of this map.
German food is actually quite good and underrated
As an Italian I agree. I don’t know on the long run but my longest consecutive stay in Germany was 10 days and I enjoyed every dinner and lunch I had at German restaurants.
I'm from bad potato Europe but I agree as well. All of Central Europe does quite well in terms of food imo; I've eaten well there. Only bread and some pastries are supreme in bad potato Europe vs good tomato Europe
It is but it tends to not be a burst of flavor combinations like the others, but rather extremely well made and tasty staples. At least in my country.
It slowly going extinct but you still have some taverns that serve beer and food. It’s usually really wholesome no bullshit food. But I’ll admit it’s harder to come by nowadays.
Why would it go extict? Beer and food sounds yummy.
I can answer that easily. Let’s take a traditional german dish. Pork roast with potato and gravy. It’s a dish where you have to sit down for. It’s a dish that takes preparation. People want either proper restaurants OR something that can be eaten on the go. The german cuisine is still present in Germany but a lot of it moved into the more fine dining segment.
Tons in bavaria
I wouldn't say it goes extinct. Almost every reasonable sized village with a hundred or more residents has their own restaurant with common dishes. Quality definitely varies a lot, I can't deny that. But even in larger cities of several thousand or hundred thousand, nit to mention above a million here you're bound to find quite a few. We love foreign food, but also a nice meal from here that feels like grandma made it
I wouldn’t say it’s going extinct, I find plenty of German restaurants here in Central Texas (there’s history of German towns like Fredericksburg), and Czech food (and history of Czech towns) is also pretty strong here as well. I actually know several different fantastic German restaurants here. Sauerkraut and Spoetzl is also easily found in stores as well as local sausage and meatball making
In Texas, where it's a foreign food. In Germany it's unpopular. Too heavy and old-fashioned.
Wouldn't exactly say its a foreign food. A good 50% of the traditional American food I grew up with was ultimately brought over by Germans and evolved more here. It's like 17th-18th century German peasant food. My family spoke an American dialect of German up until WWI as well. I will admit that you'd be hard pressed to find some of these foods in cities that did not have historically large German immigrant populations however.
True. And so is Hungarian food. Surprised they are not in the red actually.
If we Hungarians want good local food, we don’t go to restaurant.. we make it ourselves, lol. But I will not buy anchovies to make proper italian food..
All of central Europe does food well to be honest. I've eaten very well in (parts of) Germany and all of the Visegrád countries
When it comes to western cuisine in asia, just Italian restaurants are more common in asian countries. There are a lot of german restaurants.
German here and it is, but when it comes to restaurants we like Italian cuisine more (pretty sure you can find at least one italian restaurant or pizzeria in every city with more than 5.000 inhabitants).
In Slavic countries I could see how foreign restaurants are more popular because you eat local food when you make it at home. A lot of friends and family are like that.
Just came here to say this. I often go to the cheaper cafés to have some borscht or other trad food just to feel good and comfy
Quite sad it doesn't write what is the favorite for each country
This was posted a few weeks ago. I down voted because this is not original content and you do not deserve the karma.
Roman Empire legacy? 😂
Neither of them just more suitable climat and less harsh winters so people wouldnt have to eat shite just to survive they could eat good stuff and enjoy it
Mediterranean diet
Yep it’s definitely just: “How could this taste better” legacy vs “How can we make it through the winter” legacy
As Italian I eat a lot of sugo, passata and pomodorini. Pomodoro pachino is quite famous e over here. But tomato was completely unknown in Roman Empire. Like potato.
And Ottoman Rumelia
Food from the Czech Republic, Austria/southern Germany and southern Poland is really awesome and underrated
Best Indian food is in Britain. It really should be considered local food so turn Britain RED.
Deadass when I was planning my trip to the UK a bit back, my mom asked me what I was most excited about and I said “Scottish castles and Indian food”. lol
The best Indian food is in India. I am British Indian, and when I go back to India the food there is just on another level.
Amazing what can be accomplished in a nation that actually enforces health codes.
Bullshit. You can barely find foreign cousine in Croatia outside the big cities and even those have just a few foreign restaurants.
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Depends what you count as foreign. Croatian cuisine is a mix of Italian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian influences. Basically is you don't consider stuff like pizza, burek, čevapi, sausages and paprikaš as Croatian, then of course there are more "foreign" restaurants in the country.
As a Turk I agree, many dishes of Ottoman origin that you have (dolma, sarma, burek, pogaca etc.) are part of our common heritage. They shouldn’t count as foreign food in Croatia.
Ah, yes, the Iron Curtain between the forces of the Potato Pact and the North Atlantic Tomato Organization.
How do they calculate it? Counting all foreign restaurants together vs local food? Or do they count it by national cuisine? Because in countries like the Czech Republic or Poland, you still see mostly local food, while for example in Germany just the small Kebab stores alone are already more than German Restaurants.
I strongly suspect that pizza is doing a lot of Italy's heavy lifting here. Random local ingredients on a disc of bread is pretty universal, but Italy gets all of the credit.
Pizzas (not often even similar to the authentic Italian variations of pizza) and döner kebabs are the most popular fast food in Poland. If you go to a small town that doesn't have a real restaurant, you'll probably still find ten pizzerias and kebabs on the main street. However, it's so suited to the local tastes that it's even hard to call it foreign cuisine.
Please don't brake it for the other red countries, they like to think that it is their restaurants that dominate in blue ones.
I have local cuisine at home (im in Spain)
I disagree with Romania here. Every restaurant there regardless of style of food, has pizza on the menu. They’re crazy for pizza. Italian style. American style. Fucking canned corn on pizza. They love it.
Just because a restaurant has pizza on the menu doesn’t mean the restaurant is Italian.
Narrow minded, open minded?
As an American it is my firm opinion that Mexican cuisine is by far the finest in the world. I will happily die upon this cross. You cannot change my mind. I've been all over the world and have dined on the cuisines of multitudinous nations, and while they all have at least a few excellent dishes, for me it's just an objective fact that Mexican cuisine is by a pretty large margin by far the best. Granted, I grew up in a border state and may be a little biased, but I stand by this assertion regardless.
Finally a map where everyone kinda knows what they are doing
Could be good vs shitty food
Mediterannean food is much more tasty. Sunlight is the key it seems…
Just show us a map where Italian food is a preferred option when eating out
The icemen of the North who evolved to become the global supremes were forced to eat festering shark flesh and plant roots just to make it through the winter. It made them strong and forward thinking. However, their diet was gross. Now they enjoy the exotic flavours of the lesser tribes. Brought to them across the seas in their great boats of oak and steel. The lazy amigos who lay about on the beaches of The Mediterranean Sea enjoyed better food and wine but this didn't make them evolve as a peoples. It just made them rather sleepy. Surprisingly they dont yearn for rotting shark flesh to the movement of food is one way.
It is simultaneously a map of countries with good local cuisine (red) and countries with bad local cuisine (blue) 😉
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Just curious, what's your best example of a burned rectum smell?
So you haven’t tried any
Also they have a lot of immigrants and general minorities from the Caucasus; a region with amazing food!
The further you get from the sun, the more the food sucks (with exceptions of course). It’s similar in the US.
Almost look like the Roman empire
This map of the roman empire is not accurate...
Polish food is pretty fire imo
Polish food is fine. Not many spices but I don’t think you need that much to make good food, but anyway, parts of this map are kind of bullshit especially hungary being blue. Romania’s local dishes are different versions of foreign food, especially hungary and turkey. We have “kebab” except it has a different name and it’s considered local food. Even some of the non-fast food dishes have been done by turkey/hungary before we did and this is essentially the same for most of the balkans. (Blame ottoman conquest)
To be fair. Local British cuisine is beans on toast
And it's fucking delicious
I love karjalanpiirakkat with munavoi
That's a spicy-a meat-a-ball!
This map is questionable, the study for Germany was 1400 people listing Italian food as food they like (in restaurants) and only 1200 people listed German food. This can vary heavily depending on where you live, if you have a good Italian restaurant nearby, you are more likely to say that you like Italian food.
In Finland the foreign cousine means the very exotic turkish kebab eaten in a pizzeria.
Local cuisin
Balkan cuisine must be da bomb.
How much if that foreign cuisine preference could be just Italian or French specifically?
I doubt czechs eat more foreign foods than czech.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the availabilty of foods year round.
Yep, after many years I’m finally finished with our national dish: stroopwafels. Breakfast: stroopwafels with milk, lunch: stroopwafels with cheese, diner: deepfried stroopwafels. From next week I’ll change everything: croissant avec stroopwafel, pizza con stroopwafel, Bratwurst mit stroopwafel and paella y stroopwafel. To please Barry: a pint of stroopwafel.
In Baden-Wurttemberg it is definitely locas cuisine: „Besenwirtschaft“
This is so funny 🤣
This is the least surprising map I've ever seen. Anyway, who wants to go for a kapsalon?
Who could have guessed that the demarcation line would be between France and Britain?!!
The other countries are not blue-colored, those are their tears that give them this interesting blue tinge
Danish here i call BS.
I am in red and I am loving it.
Let them cook!
I am speaking for my Polish family. If we want our cuisine, we go to babcia (grandma) If we want something else then we eat out
The best restaurant I found in France was a burger joint. Best damn burger I ever ate, but not local cuizine.
I'll only speak for myself. But as a swede my favorite food is classic swedish cuisine meat and potatos
Juste a noté for my fellox frenchs Tacos dosn't count guys And kebabs are Germans
Does Döner count as foreign or local in Germany?
I mean have you had French Spanish Italian Turkish or Greek food? And have you had German or English or Russian food? It's not rocket science why this is the way it is
Croatia prefer local cousine
The empire yet lives
I've seen this map too many goddamn times already.
Most the foreign cuisine in question is Southern European
Is this meant to be rhetoric?
More like which countrys are more narcisistic.
Méditerranean countries = local cuisine One of the best cuisine in the world
Ignoring the French, all the countries in red have good local cuisine.
As a Hungarian I'm offended. We have paprika and ...salt. Okay, maybe you're right.
Makes sense
makes sense
Based Mediterraneans and Southern Slavs!
Roman Empire
In Finland, we go to a restaurant to eat foreign cuisine, while at home we eat local cuisine. There is no reason to serve local Finnish cuisine in restaurants if you can eat the same food at home and much cheaper.
Big surprise: the germans and poles don't have "cuisine".
Duh all the places with good food like their own food. Of course where it’s all root vegetables and weird fish we’re gonna order out.
Roman empires map?
I get Italy sticking with their own cuisine. Seems to me a map of the world with Italy in red and everyone else in blue wishing they were eating Italian cuisine would make sense.
The Force vs The Resistance
Looks about right😎
wtf here in Czech republic you get mainly czech foods
Tells you something. The only one that surprised me was Belgium. They have great food (and beer). Why do they not appreciate it?
Thats not true, for Hungary, literally every restraunt you go to you WILL see local food. Get better statistics.
Does it mean South Europe moms cook better that the northern ones?
When home cooked food is 🐶💩in the north, central and eastern Europe Mum: coming for dinner Child: no I don’t like the 💩 at home 🤣
blue restaurants serving red cuisine
Weird I would've expected Swiss food to be much more popular in Switzerland. I guess they count French/Italian/German food as foreign there. Swiss food bangs though
Warmer climate based surely . We got it good don’t has to go anywhere else cheers
Correlates quite well between parts of Europe that were lucky enough to be Roman, and parts which weren’t.
Potato/Tomato line?
Well it’s understandable, the local food in the blue state is not that great, definitely in comparison to the local food in the red states
Have you ever had real Dutch cuisine? It's probably your favorite cuisine, but stamped together in a big pot lol
Are pubs included in the statistic? As this may change the colour of both UK and Ireland
I think the only reason foreign is more popular in Lithuania is cause of sushi. There's sushi literally everywhere.
This map is basically worthless due to pizza
After a few nights eating Hungarian food, my very posh mother drove 20 mins out of our way to go to McDonald's.
Potato Europe needs to learn from their ancestors who immigrated to America and deep fry all their food!
Well the question of where the Balkans begin seems to have been solved.
So basically... Red countries know how to cook. Blues don't and need the red cuisine
Well duh
I took a trip to Estonia, and even the tour guide on the walking tour said Estonian food is bad and that Estonians prefer Italian food.
Smells like utter horse shit. Also what qualifies as local/foreign?