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What’s your least favourite cuisine?

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Chinese in China is a runner up. Think meat and veg boiled for about an hour then served up with water it was boiled in.

But runaway winner is Filipino food. You can’t get anything except hot dogs and burgers and if you do happen to find something local it’s always got this little bastard bitter gourd thing that really is the devils work

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Comments

  1. Ethiopian goat meat and carpet underlay, but not really fair to pick on them.

    Mexican food as served in the UK – take some nice flavours and stir them together until they taste of nothing, then ladle it into an insubstantial bread or crisp wrapper, to facilitate the transfer of the gloop to your shirt.

    • Can comment on both of those. My sister-in-law, being Kenyan, has Ethiopian friends, who have pointed me to good places to eat. I recognise the ‘carpet underlay’ of which you speak and, given a choice, I would mop up my sauce with rice rather than ‘njera’, but the sauces are gorgeous and well worth mopping up.

      Mexican food – bang on. Refried beans? I just don’t get it.

    • “Mexican food as served in the UK” is a particular bugbear of mine. I’ve had excellent Mexican food in TX, AZ, NM and CA. Hell, even in Mexico. And I grant you ‘Mexican food’ in California is as authentic as ‘Indian food’ in Norwich but… Mexican food is particularly poorly done here in Blighty.

      At the Ealing Blues Fest some years back, ordered fish tacos. Handing them to me the hipster muttered ‘ran out of halibut, made them with smoked mackerel’. Without doubt the most horrible thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.

      Years ago I gave up paying fifteen quid for half-arsed burrito prepared in a food truck by a bearded hipster named Jeremy. I shall go without, thank you.

      • Agree Mexican food in AZ, NM, CA is top notch compared to UK Mexican dross.
        Ref original post and Chinese food in China. I did a 3 week tour of parts of China including Sezhuan province. Reading the guidebooks prior to visiting I was excited to try Sezhuan hot pot. I did – it was horrendous. A communal reservoir of gristle, fat, tendons, intestine and very little meat.
        A close second was Guinea pig in Peru.
        Not a pleasant experience either.

  2. I’m not a fan of French cuisine. Too rich, no fibre, veggies cooked to a pulp, frequently uses revolting ingredients. The French peasant food they look down on is ok like coq au vin but most of the posh stuff is horrible. Croque Monsieur s’il vous plaît !

  5. I have had Chinese food in Taiwan, it was brilliant. However the “sea cucumber” is not too my taste.

    Worse food ever British school dinners ca. 1973

  6. Sushi. I’ve only been to a sushi restaurant once. Paid a fortune, ate the food I was served despite finding it unappealing and tasteless, left the restaurant feeling still hungry but a lot poorer. Having never felt the inclination to repeat the experience I don’t know if that’s the norm.

  7. Mexican for sure. I once was taken out to dinner in LA by some music industry types and they suggested I try the chicken cooked with chocolate. Interesting for a couple of mouthfuls. However going to hear the Haden triplets afterwards made up for it.

  8. I’m fairly conservative with food. I like most cuisines but only limited items from each. Not keen on Thai tbh.
    We had a fantastic Mexican meal in San Diego at a place recommended to us as where Mexicans eat and sure enough, it was about 60% Mexican clientele.

    • Love Thai. Best meal I probably ever had was in Bangkok. Incredible. Was with Thai colleagues who ordered everything, maybe about 6 to 8 different unique to me dishes. All amazing

      • Over here, Thai is the Asian equivalent of Italian. If you have a group of people and you’re looking to decide on where to go for lunch or dinner then Thai is the option that is most likely to be acceptable with everyone.

  9. British … Not a lover of a Roast Dinner
    (I know there’s more to British Cuisine than a Carvery).
    Selective with Thai and similar because of my aversion to coconut.
    Never really enjoyed Morrocan Tagine dishes.

    Not that I’m picky …

  10. I think some of the best food in the world is from Spain and Italy. However…..

    A week in Rome – no, I don’t want any more bloody pasta!

    A week in Sevilla – what is it with the tapas, can I have a proper plate with a proper meal on it, please!

    • If one has to stick to a single country’s cuisine every day, then I think Italian would be my first choice. Pasta or risotto or pizza. It annoys me though that so many Italians think no other country’s cuisine is even worth trying.

      • There are lots of Italian dishes that don’t use cheese. But Italian cuisine is extremely regional. While I thought the food in Puglia, where I used to live, was exceptionally good, the food in here in Sardinia has been something of a disappointment in comparison.

        • We are in Puglia at the moment – the food is mostly terrific! Yes there is a lot of pasta, but I’ve never had it like this before.

          The disappointments are salads and the lack of veg. Salads seem to be iceberg lettuce with the odd shred of rocket and a couple of small tomatoes cut in half. Not a green veg in sight.

    • The thing I dislike about Tapas (anywhere in the world) is the sharing thing.
      I order the food I want to eat. I don’t want to give it to you in exchange for a bit of something you’ve ordered that I don’t want to eat.
      If you want what I’ve ordered, put your own order in. Please.

  11. French, for me.

    Many years ago I went to a business lunch in a fancy restaurant in Paris. I was still fully vegetarian at the time, hadn’t yet flipped to pescatarianism, and when I sat down and consulted the menu I discovered that there was essentially nothing I could eat, beyond the basic table salad.

    Obviously a bit of an awkward situation, so I discreetly flagged down our waiter, explained my predicament and asked if he could help. He looked me up and down imperiously and asked the immortal question: “if you are vegetarian, then what are you doing here?”

    I couldn’t really fault the logic, and consequently I have studiously avoided French food, and indeed France, ever since.

    In terms of the other European nations, I’ve always found German food really poor; all the carbs of Italian, with none of the joy, plus the weird obsession with foam.

    Italian, I could happily never eat again. Don’t like pizza, and sick of pasta. It’s been done. Spanish is still pretty great.

    In terms of favourite cuisines, I’d probably have Japanese hands down at the top. I could eat sushi every meal, and the good stuff is off the charts good (and clean). Beyond that, Caribbean and Mexican, and then maybe Peruvian – way too slept on – and Greek.

    Generally, I don’t want anything fried or battered, which rules out a lot of British classics. I also don’t want anything that’s served floating – a man must have a code.

    • I agree about German food. I once spent a week with some friends on the Rhine doing a lot of walking (though it wasn’t a walking holiday) and every bar and restaurant seemed to have a similar menu – lots and lots of different ways of cooking pork, occasionally with the option to have some potatoes or rice, no green veg to be seen anywhere. It played havoc with my guts.

      • The sort of German food of which you speak is quite typical, it’s true, of part of the menu in many Rhineland restaurants. This very evening I had Jägerschnitzel and chips (pork escalope with mushroom sauce), sitting alongside the Rhine, and very fine it was too.

        View post on imgur.com


        I’ll make two points about this. One, in. my experience, German traditional cuisine is very similar to the traditional hearty British pub grub of meat and two veg, and while that’s not all that British food is these days, pies, burgers and steaks are commonly on the menu in English hostelries.
        Two, over here, there’s usually a good variety of salads and fish dishes also on the menu, if you’re eschewing the carnivorous route. Germany now has its fair share of vegan and vegetarian options and whole restaurants.

        My least favourite cuisine? Offal, in any form. Liver at my prep school made me retch, and steak and kidney wasn’t much better.

    • A vegetarian friend of mine was on secondment for work in Texas and asked where a good place to eat for vegetarians was.
      “California” came the reply.

      • Travel writer Peter Moore was asked once “I’m visiting Indonesia and I’m vegetarian, have you any advice regarding the availability of vegetarian food?”
        His response, “I hope you like rice”

  12. So I think most of the world’s foods have been covered here except Indian? People not liking Chinese, French, Italian, Thai, Mexican cuisine. Bit baffling for me.

  13. Greek, probably, once the meze are out the way. I love all the cold stuff, dips and stuffed vine leaves etc etc, but the main courses are drab and dull. Plus, the extraordinary insistence on waiting until a dish is lukewarm before serving. The fact my second wife was Greek (Cypriot) may well have something to do with my distaste….

    • One of the worst meals I ever had was Greek (in Zürich) Have also had very good Greek food, especially in Toronto which has a large Greek immigrant community

      • I like British, British-Indian, British-Chinese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Nepalese, Mexican, American, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek, German, Hungarian, Cuban and Thai which kind of leaves … French (really not too keen; too many memories of a stinky Andouille sausage galette) and Afghan (underwhelming in my experience; curries like paste or insipid stews with sheep’s feet floating in them).

    • Whereas my favourite meal was at a Greek taverna in Athens with a Greek and part Greek part Scottish family who’d invited us to stay with them on our way home.

      Great company and as I recall great food. I recall saying to the grandfather “if I eat any more I’ll have to take my stomach on as excess baggage”. Translated into Greek for him he found it hilarious.

  14. Chinese food in China is very very dependent on where you are – sure there are some of the boiled meat and veg dishes, but that’s a very small part. Think Szechuan (spicy), Cantonese, Shanghai noodles, the list goes on. Some very good food. My only complaint about food in China is that they tend to like it a lot saltier than my palate prefers.

    As for Filipino – Chicken Adobo is wonderful (but then I like the sour vinegar taste). I do agree with you on Bitter Gourd though – my wife loves it.

    I like food from most cuisines of the world, so difficult to decide on least favourite. I may have to go with American – too much fried food, too much sugar, too much full stop !

  15. I’d say the worst food I’ve encountered on my limited travels was in Prague. I found it very hard to find anything appealing on the menus and some of the dishes the locals were eating looked like lumps of bone and gristle which they tackled with sharp little knives. Even the vegetable options were unpleasant when served.

    It reminded me of the line from So I Married an Axe Murderer where Charlie suggests that Scottish cuisine is “based on a dare”. There’s plenty of traditional Irish fare that I have no appetite for, from cabbage and bacon to coddle.

    • To combine Prague with another dislike above, I once went for a long walk there into a residential district being the castle. Suddenly realising it was about 7 pm and I had been walking for hours I went into a little cafe and ordered a beer and the Veggie pizza. The pizza turned up green, and black when the green was scraped away, because Veggie turned out to mean a whole can of black olives, and then a while can of green Olives tipped onto the base. Much as I like Olives it wasn’t great. Tbh not much of the food I’ve had in several visits to Prague was very good.

      • Back in the mid 90s, I spent a couple of weeks in Prague, working for the film festival. As part of our contract we were provided with lunch every day in the canteen at the grim old Soviet building where the festival was based. I have nothing but good memories of the festival and the people and the spectacular beer, but my god, the food was genuinely bloody awful in a grey and lumpy way that I’d not really experienced since primary school dinners in the 1970s. But with more dumplings.

    • Loved Prague, loved the beer, but the only food I was sold was fried meat with a potato salad at most . After a week, even a carnivore like me was dreaming of vegetables.

      • You’ve just reminded me of my trips to Albania. Absolutely gorgeous country, but grotty meat dishes are my memory of the food. I haven’t been for 20 years or so, so might have improved since then.

      • Prague is actually OK for veggie restaurants. The ones I know are fairly basic, ‘grub’ rather than high cuisine, but looking just now there seem to be plenty of new ones since my last visit a couple of years ago.

        • We were in Prague in about 2013. A great city. The food was … OK, I suppose. “Hearty”, one might say.
          But what I didn’t like was that smoking was still permitted in restaurants. I’d forgotten how disgusting it is when you’re trying to eat, and people all around are blowing cigarette smoke at you.
          I wonder whether the smoking-in-restaurants law in the Czech Republic (Czechia?) has changed since 2013?

          • It has and is similar to to the UK, so you might have to wade through smokers outside but will be fine inside. I remember when U Zlatého tygra was like a 1980s school staffroom.

  16. I’m pescatarian these days, but even so I’ve never had much truck with seafood. Anything involving squid, octopus, crab, lobster or the sloppy insides of shells is guaranteed to have me running for the gents with my stomach in my mouth.

    • I grew up on the coast in Scotland. Every now and again, my parents would go to the beach to collect whelks. What happened next was always the same. They would boil the bloody things in the kitchen, causing my brother and I to seek refuge as far away from the kitchen as possible (you cannot imagine the fetid stink of boiling whelks, and I’m far too nice a guy to force a description onto you). Then my Mum and Dad would gorge on them, saying things like “you don’t know what you’re missing” to my brother and I as we looked on disgusted. Finally, at around 2am we’d hear them running to the toilet.

      I’m sure shellfish can be very tasty. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never eaten them once in my life.

    • Grilled octopus is probably my favourite thing to eat. (Which, I am given to understand, is cruel when one considers that octopuses have an IQ considerably higher than most reality TV contestants.)

    • I remember expressing my love of seafood to a Barcelona native who took me to a restaurant in nearby Sitges and seemed determined to find something I wouldn’t eat. Dish after dish of recently deceased sealife, some of it looking back at me, was produced and eaten with gusto until I was full. It was delicious.

      The best seafood I’ve had was in Olhao, Portugal. The fish Cataplana would be my Death Row Dish. We returned from that holiday expecting our first child. A little reminder of one of the powers of seafood.

    • I have quite a severe intolerance towards shellfish, just a trace of it has me heaving, I went on an organised birding trip to Japan and despite disclosing this on the pre-tour questionnaire asking for any food allergies I was assured that most meals would be 10 – 12 courses and I’d easily be able to avoid seafood. Well they were half right, it was easy to avoid the 6 or 7 dishes with shell fish in them but this left 5 or 6 dishes, often just a single mushroom or a tiny piece of vegetable matter, every meal I left feeling hungry and being in Japan I was told it would be offensive to our hosts to do an Oliver Twist and ask for more. For two weeks I more or less lived on 7eleven vending machine chips and sausages and must have been borderline scurvy when I got home, compounded by the fact it was February and there was hardly any fruit to be had anywhere.

      • Sorry to hear that:I know vegetarians and others also fall foul of the amount of pork put into rice dishes. Fresh fruit can be surprisingly expensive here because of tariffs on imports and tendency of Japanese farmers to sell fruits as luxury items.

        • My wife is vegetarian and over the years we have travelled often to Japan, including some of the more out of the way areas. Whilst it has sometimes been a challenge, we have always managed to find vegetarian food for her – with the aid of google translate, we have been able to tell restaurants that she is vegetarian and have often found they will knock up a noodle dish that suits

          We also find these days that in the major cities (esp Kyoto / Osaka) that vegetarian options (and vegetarian restaurants) are much more prevalent (although you still get the odd weird case such as having a vegetarian ramen set which is pure vegetarian but comes with pork gyoza !).

          Our “get of of jail’ card has always been the Japanese curry chain Coco Ichiban which are everywhere and have a full vegetarian menu)

  17. I’ll nominate the Norwegian cuisine.
    Never had it? There’s a reason for it. My mum’s Norwegian, and after moving to Sweden and marrying an Italian, she rarely cooked anything Norwegian again, after discovering what good food should taste like. So I grew up eating mostly Italian food, and mum rarely misses an opportunity to talk smack about Norwegian cooking.

    Now, you may ask: “Isn’t Norwegian food and Swedish food pretty much the same?” The answer is NO. Sure, we have a few dishes in common, but if you look at the cuisines at large, they are very different. Norwegian food is extremely bland, except when it’s revolting. They also only eat one cooked meal a day, and sandwiches for the other meals – and not even proper sandwiches (smörrebröd) like the ones the Danes make!
    Their only saving grace is that they have access to fresh fish, so if you enjoy fish you’ll be OK. But they’re not doing anything particularly exciting with that fish, so it’s not much of a comfort, really!
    Apologies to Norwegians everywhere, but your food is dull. 😉

    I haven’t been to England since 1982, and people claim that things have become better, foodwise, since then…but how much better? Because you started at the very bottom! 😀

    (Leaning back, waiting for pickled herring comments…)

    • Me and a load of European colleagues went for dinner in Oslo. All the waiting staff were dressed in national costume because today was the day when the first cod of the new season was caught, the first of the new potatoes farmed and the first cloudberries picked from the mountain tops. All three on one large plate.
      It was all very delicious. Then it was announced it was tradition that after the long dark winter the very same dish was served again. We all looked at each other, Brits, Italians, Spanish, Polish, German and Dutch, shrugged and said “It’s tradition, let’s go for it.”
      One nation, represented by three citizens, sat there and refused to join in. The very idea was an insult. God bless the French.

    • You’ve not lived until you’ve experienced the wonder of the longest herring table in the world at Haugesund. A 365m-long table laid down the middle of the street and covered from one end to the other in herring dishes!

  18. Wrongly posted this elsewhere, but came here to say I like British, British-Indian, British-Chinese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Nepalese, Mexican, American, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek, German, Hungarian, Cuban and Thai which kind of leaves … French (really not too keen; too many memories of a stinky Andouille sausage galette) and Afghan (underwhelming in my experience; curries like paste or insipid stews with sheep’s feet floating in them).

    • Of course top class British cuisine is hugely French influenced. Low class British cuisine deserves its terrible world wide reputation. Generally better than it used to be though. For Indian I prefer the British style which is Bangladeshi or Pakistani, bit less keen on South Indian stuff but it’s still great.

        • I consider it to be 3 things to get right, the fish, the batter and the chips. It’s also big in Canada at least in Ontario. Can be very good, specialist places only doing fish related things, no pies, sausages etc. and generally the fish is always cooked to order.

          • Fish and batter.
            Have noticed that many chip shops have frozen fish, dip in batter, and fry. Principle is sound – not always easy to have proper fresh fish inland – but this does have the effect of creating a Yorkshire pudding-ness as the fish and batter cool.

        • Generally pub food is rubbish. As soon as they start forgetting they’re pubs and start having gastro this or that pretensions it goes wrong. A basic pub grub menu fine. “Burger stack” at 20 quid etc, hmm.

          • UK pub food is generally very good, sometimes outstanding. In France you used to be able to fall off the motorway into the first village and there’d be a little Ma&Pa restaurant serving lunch and a flagon of wine for ten francs. Not any more. France is the biggest market for McDonalds outside the US. My main gripe these days about UK pubs is not the quality of food but the price.

            • It can be, but more often than not it isn’t, or the service is chaos, or they decide that day that they won’t do food for some reason, or the thing you want is off. The only certain thing is it’ll be expensive.

              There used to be a Fullers pub in Harpenden (calling @feedback_file, maybe there still is) which obviously had great beer and the food was done by some Thai people who had it absolutely down pat. Excellent arrangement.

              • Another Fullers pub, The Elephant Inn in North Finchley, also has Thai food. In a restaurant upstairs or table service in the bars.
                Beer is well looked-after but choice is a bit limited and service can be slow.

          • Since Covid, the standard and range of pub and hotel food has declined noticeably while prices have gone up quite a bit. I work away a lot and I’m fed up with the same old items trotted out on the menu. I’d also say that anything less than £20 is a lottery in terms of what you’ll get. We find Chinese or Indian places generally offer much better food and value but we aren’t always able to get out.

            • We were at a theatre restaurant earlier this year which had just unveiled its ‘spring menu’ which I would imagine didn’t change for a good few months.

              The veggie choice was a couple of quorn fillets and veg hardly I think utilising the ‘chef’ to the best of his abilities. I imagine the meal is bought in, heated garnished and served. The tomato and onion salad was large slices of beef tomatoes interspersed with onion and no dressing.

              Come to that why can’t burgers be served with roast tomato instead of a large slice of cold beef tomato and salad so that it has to be held together with one of those wooden skewers. Then when you bite in the whole centre filling squeezes out to land on the plate.

            • During and after Covid, a lot of foreign-born pub cooks went back home because after Brexit they got no financial support. Some of them didn’t return and those that did discovered they were in short supply and therefore wanted more money. Some pubs who were only just making money on food before, found it was no longer economical to serve it.

  19. My holiday in Croatia was the least cuisined. Iceland was so incredibly expensive, I had to eat cheap, bland stuff. However, America is just awful. A huge pile of crap. Fortunately, they have loads of Italian, Chinese, Mexican etc on offer instead.

  20. My mum’s cooking god bless her. Do you remember Wendy Craig’s character in Butterflies? I had no idea how good food could taste until I started eating out with friends or after I’d left home. My first curry from a restaurant having only experienced Vesta previously was incredible. Hi by the way. Much been happening?

  21. African food is overwhelmingly average. Drowned in oil usually a little bit of meat some tomato and onion relish. Perhaps some karo, plantain and either rice or maize meal- ugali , pap or sadza it goes by various names. Only ace meal I had in sub-Saharan Africa was in Cameroun – a local took me there. Plenty of elite there. They mixed local ingredients and French flair.
    My least favourite style of cooking is Korean.

  24. A lot is made of Australia’s Pacific Rim cuisine, and it takes travelling out of the country to realise how good we have it here (at least in the past 10-15 years). I can walk out of my office and get better Malaysian food than I had in the two-weeks I spent in Brunei which was mostly lots of boney chicken pieces boiled in coconut milk with curry powder, or gristly stewed beef.

    I love most cuisines, but I will always avoid French cooking if I can; overly fussy, creamy, and haughty. That has fortunately become easier over the years as French cooking has seemingly vanished from the culinary landscape over here. I think it held sway over the British for years for reasons that are as much cultural as culinary, but it simply can’t compete with the joyous and unpretentious flavours available elsewhere.

    I do have one serious chink in my culinary armour, and that is a huge aversion to seafood of any kind. The merest hint of seafood is utterly repellent to me, to the point where I can’t even sit at a table with people consuming it. This aversion extends to seaweed, so even non-seafood sushi I find repellant. This made a recent trip to Japan interesting, as seemingly everything is infused with seafood of some kind, so I’m in the strange position of far-preferring westernised Japanese cuisine to the real thing.

    • I’m going to disagree on the French food.

      For my sins, I do the cooking at home, and as a result I watch two food shows over here in Oz: Adam Liaw’s Cook Up, and Guillaume Brahimi’s Plat du Tour.

      The latter is a tour around France, sampling all the regional specialties. Sure, there’s butter and cream, but there’s a lot of very good basic food as well – daube and cassoulet not least among them.

      • Am a bit surprised that a number here don’t like it. Have had wonderful, memorable meals in Caen, Grenoble, Nice and Sofia-Antopolis. But found Paris to be more difficult

        • I avoid heavy on the cream food but have had two outstanding meals in Paris over the years, alongside a lot of mediocre stuff. One was an Indian meal in a very basic, almost workmanlike place with formica tables but the other was in an old style, family run place with 3 or 4 dishes on each section of the menu. I had some kind of local sausage and while I don’t remember what it was served with, it wasn’t chips. Really fabulous.

  25. If anyone is ever in Malmö, and at a loose end, the Museum of Disgusting Food is a diverting way to pass a couple of hours. The visitor tours the world, viewing exhibits of all sorts of indelicacies. Yes, of course there is a tasting table at the end.

  26. I’m struggling to think of a cuisine I don’t like. Certainly, there are restaurants that I have been to that have been far from pleasant. I have travelled a lot through work and always have had a good food in all of the continents. I have been ill twice – one defnitiely the food in Islamabad (it was tasty but it decided to abandon ship fairly quickly) and one which may have been a bug in Delhi. I recommend good hotels in India. The type that have bottled water and room service will bring additional toilet roll at 5am quickly.

    • I got badly ill a couple of times in India but considering I’ve been there about ten times plus two years living there I’d say that’s good going. My cast iron constitution lets me pile in on anything including street food which throws up some fabulous surprises (no pun intended)

  27. In Sweden food can be rather like children’s food. A simpler kind of bolognese with spaghetti that everyone smothers in ketchup, hotdogs with ketchup and mustard, meatballs with spaghetti and ketchup and a pork sausage chopped and fried with, you guessed it, added ketchup that calls itself laughably stroganoff. Then lots of sweets in the evening whether you are a child or an adult. The famed smörgås bord has it’s moments, mainly the fishy elements like gravadlax. Pickled herrings I,m quite partial too with a schnapps to wash them down. But the same elements for christmas, easter and midsommar? Must we? Why must we have a side salad with tasteless iceberg salad and no dressing? Plain boiled potatoes, bit dull. The saving grace is the cakes, buns and biscuits. They deliver.

    • I know what you mean, and that’s a fair take on the kind of food that gets served in cheap lunch restaurants, school kitchens, and in many homes for dinner (because, I guess, it’s easier to get actual kids to eat the food if that’s what you serve). Thankfully, I never have to eat that kind of food!

      But if you go to a good restaurant that serves classic Swedish Husmanskost, that’s almost always really good. And the even better restaurants where they do modern Swedish/Nordic/fusion cooking, that is brilliant (if often too expensive…)

      The sameness of the holiday meals is OK to me – the holidays are far apart! And nobody makes all of those dishes at once anyway, you pick two or three kinds you like for each holiday – so for the next holiday you can choose three other dishes if you want. You only get the whole smörgåsbord experience at restaurants (and only for Christmas) – or possibly at some nutty old grandmother’s house, but I think they’ve all mostly died by now, complaining to the end that nobody’s eating the aladåb or sillsallad…

      The “plain boiled potato” is the star of the meal – complimenting and elevating all of the other components! Also, if you boil some extra, you can eat them cold, sliced on top of a sandwich (open face, of course) with a pinch of salt on top. Yum! 🙂

      But, of course, very few Swedes eat Swedish food on a daily basis. We cook or order food from all other countries more often than any Swedish dish (well, it’s true for the people I know, at least). Why limit yourself to one flavour profile?

      I would never say that Swedish food is my favourite, but it’s definitely not the worst either, when done right (but I’m not a big fika person, so you can keep the cakes!)

          • Ahh, yes – vickning! Wonderful stuff, sadly this tradition is in decline and most young persons don’t know what that word means. So much so, that the ruffled crisp called “Vickningschips” (despite having nothing to do with the actual Vickning) is universally misunderstood by anyone under thirtyfive. They all think it’s called “Viking chips”!

      • I spent a year or so traveling to Gothenburg most weeks. I always enjoyed the food there. There was a good choice of food types and those restaurants that were more Nordi in outlook always had good, interesting food. Service was also good.

        Lunch menus were all the same price and offered mains, a salad bar and a drink for about £9 (SEK950 I recall).

        I was rather impressed with Gothenburg.

        • I’ve lived in Sweden for more than 36 years, but have never set food in Göteborg, so you’re one up on me there, Leedsboy.

          £9 is about SEK 120. A lunch for SEK 950? That would be a pretty big splurge out – maybe a lobster followed by chateaubriand topped with white truffle. Hah!

          • My memory is poor. It must have been SEK90. I was on expenses though so I probably failed. Gothenburg is a delight. Walkable, relaxed and full of nice easy going Swedes.

      • It’s not the worst. Some dishes are really good like Wallenburgare with lingonberry and mash. Yes to that. Also skagenröra made with prawns and mayonnaise eaten on toast, then there’s räkmacka, a prawn sandwich with boiled egg. Simple but tasty.

        • Biff Lindström, Biff Rydberg, Dillkött, Janssons Frestelse, Kalvlever Anglais (which no English would claim as theirs), Persiljejärpar, Sjömansbiff, Fläsk med löksås, Torsk med äggsås, Gäddqueneller med citronsås, Kåldolmar, Fiskpaté, Isterband, Nubbesallad, Grytstek, Spenatsoppa med ägghalvor, Stekt strömming, Inkokt lax, Kalops, Västerbottenpaj, Kantarelltoast, Ärtsoppa med fläsk, Rårakor med löjrom, Pepparrotskött, Kålpudding, Pannbiff med lök, Laxpudding, Nyponsoppa med glass och mandelbiskvier, Pyttipanna, Fläskrulader, Tunnbrödsrulle, Västkustsallad, Rotmos med fläsk, even the frowned upon Smörgåstårta (med skaldjur och lax)…just to name a few delicious dishes that are heavenly when cooked well (at home or in a good restaurant). Bad versions of these are of course available (especially ready-made at the supermarket) and should be avoided!
          And now I’m hungry… 😀

  28. I was invited to Uzbekistan on a surreal ‘cultural’ visit about 15 years ago, by Gulnara Karimova, the terrifying daughter of despot Islam Karimov. It was one of the weirdest weeks of my life. I did discover the delights of ‘plov’, a sort of Uzbeki biryani but the lowlight came when I was eating what I thought were very odd beef burgers only to be told they were horsemeat.

    • Uzbekistan The Truth most welcome but in the meantime:
      Antwerp, very posh and expensive restaurant: horsemeat was delicious, like the finest cow steak.
      Vietnam – after a year helping start up new company invited out by the staff to “best restaurant in town”. Halfway through I said “That was really nice, was that chicken?”
      “You are a proper local now, that was dog.:”
      I excused myself, went outside and was sick. True story.

  30. When I was a wee lad, back in the 80s, there was a food van that always seemed to turn up at school sports day. Emblazoned on the side of the van was a description so vague, it will haunt me forever…it simply said ‘Animal Burgers’.

  31. Has anyone been to Kyrgyzstan? I tried Kumys, fermented mares milk which was pretty disgusting. But it’s nothing compared to maksym which is sold literally on every street corner. I think it’s made of barley but to me the one mouthful I took tasted of cold tea mixed with coke plus some salt. Vile stuff. But they love it there the guy who invented it was given a state funeral when he died.

  32. I know Thailand has some great food but if you go way up north be warned in some of the tribal villages you might get breakfast of porridge … with mixed vegetables added. Rank.

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