EUROPE - which country has the best cuisine?

who are the five nations of the UK, out of interest?

England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Cornwall

I was so worried about accidentally leaving out a country I must have overlooked that error.

you really think adding an extra one was the safe option?

i'm assuming you maybe meant india, that way we can still argue on the football threads.

to be fair, those aren't separate countries.

I'm in Montenegro right now, and would love to rep for all the AWESOME food I've been eating over the last week, but then I remember that my mother-in-law is Russian, and her home country should probably get the credit. Russia over France or Italy though?

proper, home-made irish stew and bacon and cabbage have been my last two meals, so i'm staying at home for this one.

Italy, as I'm going through a major pasta phase.

Panettone cassata > all other food stuffs.

Fond memories of ridiculously cheap and super-fresh seafood (squid, octopus, prawns, sardines...) from shabby seafront cafe in random Spanish port town. So good. Garlic prawns can't be beat.

Spain has the lock on seafood as far as I'm concerned but on the other hand there are seemingly no vegetables anywhere in the country. It's a toss-up between France, Greece, Italy and Turkey for me.

I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of Bulgarian food when I was there, so I'm giving it my vote as no one else probably will.

Food AND drink? Belgium.

Hungary also deserves an honourable mention. Not a huge amount of variety, but what they do they do very well.

I was thinking Belgium as a dark horse as well...

lol anyone with non-British heritage is gonna vote for their roots

Does Anglo-Indian cuisine count as English?

I was going to say I think so, but on the other hand actual Indian >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Anglo-Indian so it's kind of a moot point.

I love the indian food we get here personally. I've never been to India, though.

Does a Brick Lane curry count as real Indian, anglo-Indian or Bangladeshi? It's usually delicious, wherever you deem it to have originated from.

I'm not sure which country has the best cuisine, I just know it isn't Bosnia. Or, indeed, Croatia.

Bosnian food's ok if you can handle an all-chevapi diet.

English summer food is hard to beat, when it's all freshly caught crab and proper tomatoes and strawberries and Jersey Royal potatoes and asparagus. However, for sheer consistency it's between France and Italy. (Spain looses on the veg front as mentioned above, though scoring highly for seafood, chorizo, jamon, rioja and cava, and Greek food can be glorious, but it's so often done badly - even in Greece.)

I think France has the edge for me - lovely cheese and bread, cassoulet, champagne, crème brulee.

never trust an italian

Panettone cassata > all other food stuffs.-- Dom Passantino
lol anyone with non-British heritage is gonna vote for their roots -- Just got offed

I like Italian food, but there is a bit of a lack of variety: there seems to be about ten basic ingredients and everything is made up of some combination of these. One of the things that bugged me when I lived in Italy was how every single Italian said that Italian food was the best food in the world, but hardly any of them had ever tried any food that wasn't Italian. Outside of the big cities you were lucky to find anything much - maybe one Chinese restaurant. I was teaching English to a class of Italians (aged from about 18 to 60) once and showing them pictures of different meals from around the world - nothing too exotic, maybe a kebab and a chilli con carne and a curry and something with noodles - and most of them had no idea what they were, never mind had tried them. I asked them 'have you ever eaten anything that wasn't Italian?' and they all went quiet and looked sheepish until an old bloke slowly put up his hand and said 'Hamburger'.

that's not really a criticism of italian food as such though...

Most of that should tell you why Italian food is so very, very good. Second only to Cypriot, in fact. ;-)

In all seriousness, the same thing applies there as well. You go to a restaurant. You go to a taverna, eat meze with souvlaki and seafood and veggies and pitta and halloumi and taramasalata and houmous and grilled meats, and you desire nothing else.

but there is a bit of a lack of variety: there seems to be about ten basic ingredients and everything is made up of some combination of these

Cucina povera, innit?

Only in Italy (or a very good Italian restaurant) could a plate of pasta with tomato sauce and pepper be turned into a transcendent experience. The trick to great food is resourcefulness in simplicity.

AA Jagger

italian food: minimalism
british food: grime

salmon calzone: 65DOS

I hadn't even taken cheese into account - shit I'm going to end up voting for France.

really hungry now as a result!

what about countries that do other countries' food really good? such as the Swedes doing damn fine sushi, the Uk and Indian, the Netherlands and Indonesian...

the lack of Cornwall is certainly a sad omission as that would have been my vote.

So Scotland will have to do.

if you include drinks does france really come out any worse?

you've got champagne, muscadet, sauternes, cabernet, cognac, armagnac, pastis, pernod, grand marnier, and on and on

i wanted to say portugal but salted fish, as wonderful and variegated as its different incarnations can be, doth not a conquering cuisine make, even if it is sitting in an inch and a half of melted butter

English summer food is hard to beat, when it's all freshly caught crab and proper tomatoes and strawberries and Jersey Royal potatoes and asparagus

pastid is good???

Hmm I love Portuguese food, not least for the cakes; leaning on the counter of a Lisbon cafe snacking on a custard tart is one of life's truly lovely experiences.

I happen to love bacalhau (salt cod), so the answer has to be Portugal for me.

i knew i was going to catch hell for that

xpost

spanish cuisine has the right ingredients but constantly tend to underachieve.

Yes, Ken, and Portuguese food goes down far too easily.

whereas by using simple, well-disciplined and dependable dishes, Greek food somehow finds itself succeeding over its flashier competitors.

Israel

impossible. cassoulet vs chorizo in wine vs moussaka etc.

Spain has the lock on seafood as far as I'm concerned but on the other hand there are seemingly no vegetables anywhere in the country.

not true, i had a green bean soup thing in bilbao one time! chris told me that many spaniards eat mostly veg-only dishes at home and will dine out for meat and fish, or something like that.

thanks to fairly recent mallorcan holiday + more recent amazing dinner at Barrafina on Frith Street i am going with Spain.

http://static.flickr.com/72/189171135_d2da6e5329.jpg

question to brits: when was the last time you ate chicken tikka masala anyway?

can't remember

oh yeah, britain isn't parochial at all, especially with regards to food, as this thread clearly demonstrates!

I think you've hit the nail on the head with the middlebrow thing. This review pretty much sums up what many people I know think about it, ie. not the absolute best but a reliable old chum of a restaurant. Whereas I've found it to be more like a not-great small-town Indian transported to a trendy location.

Oh man, I really want a curry now.

My mouth is actually watering!

oh yeah, britain isn't parochial at all, especially with regards to food, as this thread clearly demonstrates!

not as much as france or italy, but it's complicated.

Native food so crap so need to import/co-opt others

so it can be poorly cooked and overpriced as well? yeah that worked

What if instead of a service culture built on tipping otherwise underpaid waiting staff (I don't mean in the UK obv.) there was a culture of tipping the cooking staff?

A waiter in a Brick Lane curry house the other week told me quite bitterly not to leave a cash tip, and moreover not to do so in any other Indian restaurant, because the staff never see any of it!

i know that happens a lot and waiters often won't get anything here but maybe the cooks don't either - point is you don't usually know.

similar point was made re Italians upthread. so funnily enough i think Britain can (at least potentially if not always in practice) have the best of both worlds as a result and this is one of the best things about living here.

what are the two worlds?

Spanish because I just had some manchego and had some jamón serrano the other day. Italian most of the time though.

sweden. mmm reindeer steak

Baguette and salted butter from Bretagne can't be topped.

Some Saint Félicien comes close though.

there's a bar in A Coruna, all it sells is cheese, ham and sausage, I could go there every day, eat their plate of home cured ham and tetilla cheese with a basket of bread on the side and die a happy man, so yeah, you could say that Spain has decent food.

My MD at work (of Italian descent) derides the spanish waste of good ingredients with it's crudity and over-use of oil, he is just so wrong, it's just proper food, yet they can still do high end tremendously well, for example, in the Kursaal in San Sebastian, you can eat a Martin Berasetegui meal, four courses, tremendous quality, bottle of wine on the side and pay just the 12 pounds each for the privilege, which is why SPain just wins over the uk and France for me, you can go out and eat the best quality food you can wish for every night and not bankrupt yourself.

The thing that throws this to France for me is the variety. You have Germanic cooking in Alsace, Ligurian cooking on the Riviera, several distinct styles of seafood from Normandy to Brittany to the Mediterranean coast, Alpine cuisines, excellent wine in almost all of regions, world class cow's, ewe's, and goat's milk dairy products, excellent fowl and meats, delicious Arab food in several cities as well as other post-colonial/immigrant foods ranging from Chinese to Vietnamese to West-African, they know how to cook local vegetables and have local gastronomic hubs in places like Lyon, that are more than just regional capitals. I really like Iberian and Italian cuisines but there's not the same breadth of terroir and Germanic cuisines are good but simpler still, coming as they do from a far less forgiving and less propitious environments. The British palate is too sweet for my tastes, though there are lots of local specialties I adore and I have often eaten well there.

I have been to that bar with Porkpie (I think) and can attest to its greatness. One of the great things about Spain is you CAN just crawl around from bar to bar and eat something in every one and it be potentially fantastic.

For me though, France just wins out of sheer variety, consistency and quality, both at the low and high end. Italy and most places around the Mediterranean runs it close though, and Maltese cuisine is kind of underrated as well(mmmmmm bunny).

Rule of thumb = food gets worse as you get further north, the bouze gets better. The worst cuisine of any country I have visited = Denmark by a mile.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Fratelli d'Italia,
l'Italia s'è desta,
dell'elmo di Scipio
s'è cinta la testa.
Dov'è la Vittoria?
Le porga la chioma,
che schiava di Roma
Iddio la creò.

UK ties for first with 21, great stuff everyone

http://img57.imageshack.us/img57/8123/jrpo3.jpg

"Salted cod! We taught the world how to eat"

lol @ 10 votes for england

noodle vague sock puppet frenzy

This is a mockery.

I call shenanigans. I voted for Belgium. Belgium has 0 votes.

http://images.worldcupblog.org/www/zidane%20butt.jpg

LOUIS I ONLY VOTED FOR ENGLAND ONCE HOW DARE YOU?

I wanted to vote for Pizza Hut.

I want to know who was repping for Serbia, Latvia and San Marino.

Serbs, Letts, San Martians?

DJ San Martian.

BRING BACK CHANGEABLE USERNAMES :(

I voted for Latvia. We're off there on holiday in a few weeks, so it was kind of a vote in hope: if I *say* they have good food, maybe I'll find some when we're there.

loving the England vote, give me a sunday roast over anything you get elsewhere in Europe. Yummmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Judging by the Polish shops/restaurants round our way I am unsurprised at Poland's showing here.

i don't know why everyone's getting so hot under the collar. the poll never mentioned "indigenous" cuisine - just cuisine in general. hence my vote for England, which I think has richer variety thanks to the broad palate of many of its residents.

In what world Irish cousine is better than Russian? In what world, I ask you? And pierogis? How come pierogies get no love?

WHAT A FARCE

Shall we just post a load of pictures of footballers and potentially racist bottle openers and chalk this one up to experience?

whcih country has the best crusade

i'm pleasantly surprised someone else voted for ireland, as i felt quite guilty doing so myself.

brother, please!

oh yeah, britain isn't parochial at all, especially with regards to food, as this thread clearly demonstrates!

alright, who voted for the Netherlands? And WHY?

Mmm, pancakes.

the dutch are good at pancakes and rijstaffel and pretty much horrible at everything else. Boiled eel is a national dish! They can't even make good beer despite bordering Belgium and Germany!

However, they do eat hagel on toast, which is the king of breakfasts.

http://www.thehollandring.com/food/food-hagelslag.gif

omg there's worms on my toast!

i don't know why everyone's getting so hot under the collar. the poll never mentioned "indigenous" cuisine - just cuisine in general. hence my vote for England, which I think has richer variety thanks to the broad palate of many of its residents.

-- CharlieNo4, Wednesday, January 9, 2008 11:37 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

INGREDIENTS

English summer food is hard to beat, when it's all freshly caught crab...

Here is a blurry photo of the best meal I've had this year.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2432/3829276997_26951387b3.jpg
Fucking hell it was delicious.

Whoever voted for Norway is crazy. Now... Wait. Nobody did. Oh well, right then.

Whoever voted for Norway is crazy. Now... Wait. Nobody did. Oh well, right then.

― Tied Up In Geir (Geir Hongro), Tuesday, 18 August 2009 00:02 (4 years ago

lol