I just found Foodguessr which is basically the food version of geoguessr. It gives you a picture, the ingredients, and a description of a dish, and you have to guess where it originated. If you’re wrong, it tells you how close you are (from hot to cold), and gives you a general direction of the right answer.
I’ve only played 2 games so far but I’ve been doing surprisingly well despite not recognizing the specific dish.
I think the clues are a little too good, particularly when it points you towards the country of origin when you’ve missed. I’d rather this stick to culinary/cultural knowledge rather than geography. Some of the descriptions also are too specific – for instance one dish from Armenia described it as being “from the caucasus mountains” which narrows it down quite a bit to start. Another said that it’s often enjoyed with Cachaca which immediately made me guess Brazil, but I guess that’s fair game since you’re using your culinary knowledge to get there.
The spices often give it away, though I’m not very experienced in cooking at all, I can put together that something with noodles, food sauce, and peanuts is very likely Thai, or that turmeric and paprika probably points me towards South Asia.
Not sure if there’s too much to discuss about the game, but I thought some of you guys might find it interesting. And maybe we’ll find delicious things we never knew existed but we can seek out.
Well, I got the first one right off the bat:Georgia (as in former SSR). Next one took me two guesses to get Indonesia. Final score was 20k. It’s not really too difficult if you have a good knowledge of world cuisine as it gives you a lot of clues. But some of these dishes could exist in multiple places, like it gave me a picture of a pork paprika stew dish, and this is what I would call a Hungarian dish, but it’s also found in neighboring countries. So my first guess of Hungary said “borders.” So I picked Czechia next, then the right answer of Romania. There’s nothing I saw in the description that would disambiguate which of those (or even others) it was looking for. I similarly got a little knotted up with a Vietnamese curry I mistook as a Thai one (Masaman curry), but in retrospect, I should have gotten it off the bat as it listed galangal and something else, maybe lime leaves, as optional instead of textbook ingredients. That one I had to take the path of Thailand, Laos, before hitting Vietnam.
There’s a compass next to the “border/hot/cold” feedback which points in a general direction of the right answer that will generally disambiguate those situations.
Ah, I didn’t notice that, but for the pörkölt stew, or whatever it is known as in Romania, I meant that there was nothing in the written clues or picture that would identify it as Romanian as opposed to Hungarian. I assume the compass only works after the first guess to let you know in which direction to look.
Just did a 5-round go of it. I scored “Super Foodie” with a score of 18,737. I would have done better, but my first dish was ‘Mie Goreng’, which was obviously Asian, but I guessed Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos (warm-warm-warm), and I thnk one other Asian country before I finally hit on Indonesia.
Ah, it’s in my history. No, my Indonesia one was Bandung, a creamy rose water drink, which is more associated with Singapore, from what I read about it afterwards. I went with Turkey first. Then got lucky with Indonesia as it seemed like something they might have out there. That was my second best score. The Toast Sandwich screwed me up, but I had the right idea. It was a piece of toast between two pieces of soft white bread. I first guessed New Zealand. Then USA (felt like something someone somewhere would have come up with), and then UK, for the win.
I tried the game again this morning while waiting for my coffee to finish brewing. Yeah, the compass clues really helped once I started noticing that. I just got 21,000:
Nasi Uduk - Indonesia - 4,500
Katsu Sando - Japan - 5,000
Bagel Toast - Israel - 5,000
Hakari - Iceland - 3,000
Ostropel - Romania - 3,500
I do really well at the game (probably averaging 22000) so I just kind of thought it was easy. I basically don’t cook anything that’s not basic and I haven’t travelled much at all outside of North America so I probably should be bad at this, but I am a very adventurous eater. Wherever I go I’ll usually try the most unfamiliar stuff, and home in Vegas is a great food town with a lot of variety, so I’ve definitely experienced an above average variety of cuisine for an American.
I’m doing pretty well- around 22-23k consistently.
But some of the dishes/clues are either so abstract or undistinguished that it’s hard to tell where they’re from. For example, I missed gnocchi, because I thought they were spaetzle, and had to use the little compass to narrow it down. Or a sort of sandwich that’s from the US, but that I didn’t know was actually a thing, and certainly isn’t famous or popular.
Some foods have multiple correct answers. I got a kind of mediterranean chickpea salad and valid answers were Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and 2 other nearby countries I can’t recall.