Most, but as picky as I am there seems to be one thing in most categories that I could eat if I had to. My first thought was Jewish cooking which looks and smells wretched to me, but I do love a good corned beef sandwich and, amazingly, I don’t mind gefilte fish (not that I’d really want to order it). I think I’d be really miserable to find myself in a Greek restaurant. The smell of it is so repellent I don’t even want to be in the same room as someone eating it. From what I’ve heard about them, there’s nothing in Scandinavian type dishes I would ever eat. I’m not totally sure what comprises French cuisine but I get the impression it’s a lot of cheese which is a NO, and cream based sauces which is a HELL NO.
No and no. There are a whole lot of French cheeses, but not so much as to take over the cuisine, and it is only a very limited range of dishes that use cream-based sauces.
I can’t think of a cuisine I’d say no to. I’m not crazy about sushi, but lots of the noodle and rice dishes are quite good. I love Greek as long as you stay away from lamb. German is a fall favorite. Tex-Mex (hang on, I need another bite of my chili enchiladas)–good. Coastal Mexican seafood. LOVE. I’m just learning to cook Indian food. Good stuff. Vietnamese is a lunchtime staple. One of my standby dishes is a Moraccan tagine of chicken with olives and lemons. Italian is fine. I haven’t had much Spanish, but I like what I’ve had. Middle eastern is fine as long as it never went “Baaaa”.
It may seem odd, but I’ve never had French cuisine. Sounds fine.
The thing about traditional southern cooking is that you’d only have one fried thing at a time as a rule. If you have chicken fried steak, you’d have green beans, mashed potatoes, and a green salad with it. If you had fried okra, it was usually with a braised meat or grilled fish. All the fried foods may feature heavily on chain restaurant menus, but they were a very limited part of what was served at home.
Sweet tea is an abomination that should be wiped from the earth. Right along with sweet cornbread. Damned sugar.
To be fair, a lot of Eastern European food is not too far off from other Central European food- sausages, roast pork, noodles/spaetzle, sauerkraut/cabbage, potatoes. Even Hungarian food wasn’t that different from the other European food, nor all that far off from things we eat here. Goulash/porkolt reminded me more of chili than anything else, even though it’s not actually chili. We could really stand to have some trdelnik stands at local events though; those things are delicious!
To answer the OP’s question, I can’t think of a cuisine that I can just condemn in a blanket fashion. There are definitely individual dishes I don’t care for, and definitely cuisines that I like more than others, but none that I just flat out don’t like at all.
Interestingly enough, probably my least favorite cuisine is the generic Midwestern/American white people meat & potatoes style cuisine. It’s not bad, just dull and pretty uninspired. I can usually do indefinitely without mashed potatoes, pot roasts, etc… I do like hamburgers though.
Yeah, if you don’t like or can’t eat cheese or cream, you’ll still be left with many options. For me, the first French dishes I think of are coq au vin, beef burgundy, onion soup, ratatouille, pot au feu, None except for the onion soup have cheese or cream in them, and even that might not have cheese (although that is typically expected here in the US when ordering “French onion soup.”)
I looked those up and they do look like something I would like. I would at least be tempted to taste them. Still not going to a Greek restaurant though. Nope. Uh uh.
I was going to say ‘nothing’, but I have to go along with this.
I’m surprised about the Greek comments. Spanikopita, moussaka and baklava all come to mind immediately, as well as souvlaki, gyros and tzatziki. In Oslo, I had fresh trout stuffed with shrimp, which was amazing.
Going with something I’m always willing to try again, but haven’t connected with so far, I’d have to say German food. I go in thinking it sounds amazing and it’ll be my best dinner ever, and then I end up sorely disappointed. I’ve even supposedly (because truly, how would I know?) eaten at several “authentic” German places and every time, the meals were too heavy, greasy-ish and lacking in very much flavor punch. I need someone of German heritage that lives close to me to cook for me. Then I’d definitely know for sure.
One word: curry.
There are even regional cuisines like Thai where I enjoy almost every non-curry item but just can’t get into the ones that use a curry. Spicy or mild. Yellow, green, red or plaid. Bleh.
“I don’t like that restaurant. The food is full of adjectives.”
I love German food, but that sounds about right to me. It’s not particularly heavily spiced; it’s good ol’ Central European fare: meat, potatoes, pickled things, starches, sausages, noodles/dumplings.
I also thought that what the OP described sounded like what chain restaurants or poor quality places call Southern cooking.
Of all the major cuisines, I probably appreciate Japanese the least. I don’t hate it and willingly agree to go if asked, but it’s not something I get excited about.
I won’t go out of my way to eat West African food. I like a few dishes, and the snack food can be excellent. But the majority of meals? Enormous lumps of gooey fufu, topped by overlooked leaves and grisly bits of meat.
If I could only eat one cuisine for the rest of my life, it would be Sichuan Chinese. I’ve made a serious effort, and I never get tired of it.
Yeah, I’m right there, and will extend it to trendy food. Back in the nineties you couldn’t swing a dead chinchilla without hitting a dish filled with pesto and goat cheese. I like both foods fine, but c’mon, people, you don’t have to put them in every dish. Now I’m not sure what’s trendy, because I have kids and therefore never go out to eat. Sriracha? Bacon?
In general I figure you need to know what to order in a particular cuisine. I love me some Southern food, but you’re not eating it for the delicious vegetables. You want good vegetables, try Thai food or Japanese food or Italian food or something. You ask me to cook up a Southern meal, you’re having the biscuit recipe I’ve spent decades trying to master, you’re having the cornmeal-crusted pan-fried trout I’m learning to make, or maybe the skillet cornbread. Some day I aspire to make good fried chicken.
I’ll make vegetables, but they won’t be Southern style.
I’ll serve you some watermelon, though.
I don’t have any particular cuisines I don’t like, but I don’t care much for attaching some foreign, frou-frou name to a plate of pasta and charging something really high for it.
Both are passe now. 
[del]Seconding[/del] [del]Thirding[/del] N-thing the condemnation of nouvelle, deconstruction and molecular “cuisines.” Also the use of gold foil as an ingredient.
Actually, I was describing food I had in Georgia, in various places of the state while visiting my brother and his family. Some places would bus people in as group outings. They were quite proud of these restaurants. One was the diner where the movie Fried Green Tomatoes was filmed. Another was an old plantation house.
It wasn’t uniformly terrible, but it certainly wasn’t all that it’s made out to be. I just get so sick of people rhapsodizing over such mediocre fare.
Tourist-y places, in other words. No wonder you thought the food was crap. It was!
Go find somebody’s grandma and taste real Southern cooking. Or ask around for places only open a few days a week that close when they run out of food. Or head up to North Carolina and eat BBQ the way God intended. Closer to home…
Tex-Mex. Salsa, cheese, beans, shredded lettuce - that’s all of it in a nutshell. Salsa, cheese, beans, shredded lettuce. Salsa, cheese, beans, shredded lettuce.