EUROPE - which country has the best cuisine?

an indian res (or, more often, rez) does not refer to a restaurant over here. not making fun.

what does it mean? *feels sheepish now*

1. rez

Native American slang for "reservation," as in "on the Indian reservation."

Ayy, there's always a party Saturday night on the rez, man.

serious lols @ anyone voting for anything from UK

Someone's already claimed they're voting for Russia, which is absolute insanity.

maybe they like cabbage and a whole lot? even still, there are better cabbage countries ...

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/images/articles/features/cal/trifle.jpg

serious lols @ anyone voting for anything from UK

-- remy bean, Wednesday, January 2, 2008 6:01 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

whole poll is ridic, but we get a claim on anglo-indian food and shit i dunno maybe food from the many other places we lorded it over, so we break even. eat that, france.

culinary imperialism?

wtf did tuomas just explain something to somebody else?

you know tuomas is all about indians, man

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who needs culinary imperialism when you've got a pork pie?

culinary imperialism?

-- remy bean, Wednesday, January 2, 2008 6:05 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

yes, england, alone among european nations, has been prone to imperial adventures on occasion. our national fuckin' drink comes from the empire. there isn't really a 'british cuisine'.

good:

spain
italy
france
belgium
germany (pastry)
portugal
turkey

okay:

everything else

crap:

wales
latvia

who the fuck knows:

cyprus
faroe islands

who the fuck knows:

cyprus

who indeed

i didn't really have any good food when i went to berlin except for a hungarian goulash and 'austrian-style' fried chicken at cafe einstein

crap:

wales

Rarebit isn't to be fucked with.

crap: latvia

Your best bet in the Baltic states is the resturant chain Cilli Kamas (I think that what it was called) which serves traditional fare and is actually rather good.

isn't cypriot food mostly just greek food? wiki says halloumi comes from cyprus, and that is good. so +1 for cyprus

at any rate, all Euro food beats Newfoundland food hands down.

NEWFOUNDLAND FLIPPER PIE

* 4 seal flippers
* 1 L water
* 500 ml soda
* 125 ml fat pork, diced
* 1 cup milk
* 2 onoins, chopped
* 5 ml salt
* 60 ml flour
* 250 ml cold water
* 5 ml Worcestershire sauce

Soak flippers in 1 L of water and soda. Trim off excess fat. dry flippers and dip in seasoned flour. Brown in pork fat. Add onions and make a gravy of flour, water, and sauce. Pour over flippers. Cover and bake at 160o C for 2-3 hours. Make a pastry and cover the flippers. Bake at 220oC for 30 minutes. Serves 6-8.

FRIED COD TONGUES

* 32 cod fish tongues
* 1 1/2 cups of flour
* 3 tbsp. margarine or cooking oil
* 1 tsp. salt
* 1/2 tsp. pepper

Carefully wash fresh cod tongues and dry in a paper towel. Put flour, salt, and pepper together in a plastic page. Add tongues and shake until they are covered evenly with flour. Melt margarine in a large saucepan. Add tongues and cook until golden brown. Serve hot, with mashed potatoes, carrots, and green peas, garnished with lemon wedges on a lettuce leaf.

Cypriot food is miles better than Greek food. It has as much in common with Turkish as Greek, less of an emphasis on one big dish at a time (hence the meze, the olives'n'pitta side-dishes aplenty and the assortment of meats), and more halloumi.

i got completely sick of halloumi but probably just because i kept over-frying it.

it's not a very original answer, but i've been going through a french food renaissance lately, both as a cook and a diner.

Spain and France tie for me, so I'm voting Andorra.

And people slagging off British/English/any part of the Uk food - do you really know what the fuck you're talking about? Honestly?

yay!

I found outside of London the food was really terrible, sorry. Soggy chips served with every meal, instant coffee, poor quality overpriced red meat. Curries were nice in Brum tho.

I voted for Italy.

I'm voting germany because I think overall I prefer their combination of drink and foodstuffs over any other. there are certainly many things italy and spain can do that are above and beyond all challengers but neither approaches the total package according to me

Where's Liechtenstein?

Can there be any doubt as to how I voted?

Trayce where the heck were you eating? Aberdeen Steakhouses?

Not even that good! I was staying in the country and eating at shitty diners, casual eateries, Wimpys, that kind of thing. I judge a place as much on its cheap food as its posh stuff, and I wasn't inspired. In fairness the home cooking I was served was nice (gammon and things yum) but god, enough with the chips.

I should be fair and point out that if you ate in rural Australia you'd likely be equally revolted as it happens.

they have Wimpys in the country? huh

I was going to say, rural WA had some absolute howlers.

And Angus steakhouses = the absolute Nadir of eating in the UK - Wimpy = twice as good IMO.

it must be difficult for tourists coming here to find what could be classed as 'British food' outside of the bog-standard variety served in most pubs tho (as opposed to UK takes on American fare). you'd have to research in advance to pick out gastropubs with the best ratings.

i would like to, just every now and then, go out for dinner at an actual restaurant serving trad British dishes, nothing too fancy but not like Harvester standard either. this is seemingly very difficult.

rivington grill was good the couple of times i went.

pub food in ireland is normally pretty good, in my experience.

It'd be hilarious if the Netherlands won. Belgium? I think our food is quite good but certainly no contender.

I think I just voted for Turkey

only the dark meat, though

France scores pretty highly for its cheap food as well, you can go to an auberge mostly frequented by lorry drivers in some village in the middle of nowhere and still get a really good meal, incomparable to what you'd get in an equivalent establishment over here. It's kind of a cliche to say that but in my experience it's true.

I slag off the food having lived on it for a year.

To be fair, you should also hear me bag on the american protestant meat & potatoes fare i spent 17 years eating.

serious lols @ anyone voting for anything from UK

-- remy bean, Wednesday, January 2, 2008 6:01 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

it's actually kind of heartbreaking to be honest

I am voting Germany, because sausage plus beer plus sweet white wines = heaven and I want to be a little contrary, but really France or Italy should just kill this.

It's not terribly difficult to find good Scottish food when eating out up here, with not a chip in sight. Game, haggis, Aberdeen Angus steaks, Scottish lamb, Ayrshire potatoes, OM NOM NOM. Then we have whisky and Deuchars IPA and heather ale and Mackies ice-cream (and Irn Bru and deep fried mars bars, obviously).

i spent a week eating UK food in London in late March. I recall eating in at least two better-known trad pubs and one contempo-ish one, church cafeterias, a Brick Lane curry place, a mod-ish chippie and a mid-range purportedly contemporary-French-influenced place in addition to takeaway sandwiches and pasties. The overwhelming flavor profile was bland/indistinct (if not in a few cases outright unpleasant), weaker than the rather good beer it seemed better-suited to than wine. the overwhelming texture was mushy or close to it. quality ingredients were rare, and what light foods I had seemed somewhat misunderstood by those who produced them. while hearty meats and grains could be quite satisfying, fruits and vegetables (potatoes don't count) appeared largely as afterthoughts, punctuation. the better foods I had went some measure to cut through the fog by introducing some minor but essential sharpness in the form of "curry," yeast, lemon, tomato, cheese and/or vinegar. they were also more often the non-british (indian or gastro pizza) or simply uncooked-or-even-composed (salad greens, cheese) meals. i'm sure there are many much poorer cuisines, but that doesn't mean it compares to what I get at home (or the no-better-than-bistro-level places I ate at in Paris). this could just be my native palate talking, but british cuisine is being defended by those whose palates are most accustomed to it as well. It's also entirely possible I just picked unwisely as blueski said.

Pubs - which ones? I could probably tell you whether or not the food is any cop at any of them.

Chippie - chances are it was crap, good chippies are increasingly few and far between, especially in London.

Brick Lane - almost certainly awful

As I hinted at upthread, the overwhelming problem with British food in pubs and some restaurants is a sense of 'will this do?' half-arsedness you get throughout the UK service industry (especially the bits tourists are likely to be coming across). There are a loads of good non-gastropubs for food in London but they're diluted by so many serving pretty bland stuff.

Really if you want to have good British food you're best off being invited into someone's house, even then I think there are several countries here that would comfortably beat any part of the UK.

The terrible reputation of traditional British food is a little undeserved but I'm not really going to defend it because of the nationalities on this list I would claim to have tried there are hardly any I'd be happy saying it's better than (lots of countries I know almost nothing about food-wise though).

There's good food in rural UK pubs and restaurants but it must be impossible to find the ones which don't just do soggy chips, cz chain anything is usually bad news so local knowledge required (lol food rockist?) and even £15+ main courses and the gastropub compulsion for unnecessarily fancy side ingredients on everything is no guarantee of anything being worth the money (and sadly for the most part any "British"-style restaurant or pub which wants to look like it has good cooking will be about that expensive or worse, which must be an automatic point-docker for the UK).

I mean whenever I've been in Ireland we've been at a total loss as to where to eat and ended up going for sandwich + soggy chips or Wagamama, but I'm sure that's not because Irish food's bad, just because we didn't know where to look.

I was very happy with all my meals when I was in Germany but they were pretty much all fried pork + maybe some mushroom sauce + a mountain of carbohydrates so I'm a little puzzled any time anyone votes for it (though German breakfasts and cake shops are beautiful, beautiful things) (and, oh yeah, sausages, wines, all the Christmas gingerbreads, FEDERWEISSER!!"£$*... oh hell, maybe Germany it is! no, no, that cannot be)