shrug I love street food, and that’s how I like to get acquainted with a culture when visiting it for the first time. Like I said, I love a Thuringer rostbratwurst, I love the langos (deep-fried potato-dough discs) of Hungary, the piri-piri chicken of South Africa, the cochinita pibil of the Yucatan, etc., etc., etc., but America’s got plenty of fast food that I have just as much a hankering for: a Maxwell Street Polish sausage, an Italian beef, pulled pork sandwiches, a proper hamburger, kimchi tacos, etc. I can’t possibly see with the wide range of street food available in America and across the world, how you can say one is uniformly “better” than the other. There are some American street foods I prefer to anything I get anywhere else in the world. There are some street foods (like the ones I mentioned above) that I prefer to anything I can possibly get in America.
I’m taking it all as a group – all convenience foods, whether found on the street or in a storefront. The criteria is that it is served quickly and at relatively small cost. It may be that if you divide the categories, then street food has some inherent advantages over franchised fast food. The problem may be that street food is so constrained in the United States that the major advantages of convenience are squeezed out.
Another Brit here, and yes I was thinking exactly the same thing.
Apart from F&Cs can’t think of anything that you would put vinegar on.
My vote for worst cuisine is Chinese as cooked in China, not overseas.
Also Polish.
People slagging off on Eastern European food need to go further south. There’s lots of nice food in the Balkans: the national cuisines most people here are probably familiar with are Greek and Turkish.
Actually, I think Greek food is really overrated. And what they do to coffee is frankly criminal.
I don’t drink coffee, so I have no opinion. And actually I’m not a huge fan of Greek food per se, but there is generally good food that doesn’t resemble what people are talking about when they are complaining about Eastern European food. In the Balkans, you get lots of cheese- or rice-stuffed peppers, spicy tomato dishes, yogurt, moussaka, cucumber salads, stews and soups. Not a lot of cabbage, nothing like Russian food.
However, I am a vegetarian and never attempted some of the scarier-looking meat dishes that appear on menus.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Greek food (or Turkish, which I think is better) but I find it gets a little monotonous. Good fish though!
Given that there are quite a lot of Nigerian people in London, it’s amazing how few Nigerian restaurants there are. They exist, but in tiny numbers compared to other cuisines. This leads me to wonder if their food is really terrible.
British food is delicious, but then so is American - it’s one of my favourite cuisines, esp. Cajun food.
I’d count curry as British, btw; curry certainly counts, since it’s been a regular in home cookery books since the 1700s, in forms which were markedly different to the ones in India, and surely 300 years is long enough for a dish to be considered native.
I’m not going to say that Spanish food is the worst, but it definitely is an acquired taste. They have a lot of tasty potato dishes, olives, gazpacho, ice creams and yogurts, and the coffee is great. But can we talk about jamon iberico? My first bite of that stuff and I thought I was eat spoiled meat. Don’t insult jamon in front of a Spaniard, though, or you might get beaten in the street.
Also, seasoning. Spaniards like their food very bland. Salt, and perhaps garlic or paprika. If you order any kind of fish or meat, that’s what you will get without any seasoning, and probably deep-fried. They don’t like to put too many ingredients together. A Spanish sandwich (bocadillo) is a large chunk of dry French bread with one slice or either meat or cheese. Can’t put meat and cheese together, that would be crazy!
And no fresh vegetables are allowed of any kind, except for iceberg lettuce. My friends and I went to Morocco on a vacation and we thought we were in heaven. Fresh produce! Spices! Food that is not fried!
YES! Other than the momos it just tastes like runny and underspiced Indian food to me. Ditto Afghani.
Wow, really? Just…wow. Wow.
I’ve never had yak butter, but if I was forced to live on a single cuisine for the rest of my life, I’d happily settle for Japanese.
Where on earth (or when) did you go to Austria? I’ve spent lots of time there and one thing notable is the quality of the salads and the food in general.
Gulaschsuppe? Schnitzel? Kaiserschmarren?
Japanese food is my favorite. Not sure why that would turn people off. I also love Thai food.
Perhaps instead of worst food, we should be discussing the best food.
I fell in love with Greek food at the age of 15, with my first visit to a foreign country for long enough to eat the local food – including time spent on Greek ships. Yes, it’s very similar to Turkish food, and other Middle Eastern food (probably thanks in part to the Ottoman Empire), but I wouldn’t call it monotonous.
I found that food in Madrid tended to be fried and heavy, but I found that the food in San Sebastian and Barcelona was quite good and much lighter.
My vote for the worst is Russian food. It seems to be based on a desire that the person regularly eating it die from cardiac arrest by the time that they are fifty. It’s also just kind of gross. The stuff I’ve had lacks spices as well. Look at this image of herring in a fur coat, and tell me if you feel hungry. Here is a recipe with preparation instructions and pictures. Bon Appetit!
British wartime food certainly left a distinct and unfavourable impression on the American troops stationed there (according to the Stephen Ambrose books I’ve been reading).
It seems reasonable to assume that rationing and shortages were about as constructive to British cuisine as prohibition was to US beer. 
That actually does look really good to me. Then again, I love pickled herring, beets, and potoatoes, so what’s not to like?
Russians do have some nice dishes: pilmeni, stroganoff, borscht, blini, etc. Yum. I guess overall, it can get a bit monotonous. Of the former USSR, you should look to Georgian cuisine for some interesting food.
I had nasty fish and chips from a place near the University of London. I’ve had a quite mediocre dinner in the Barbican center also. But we’re watching **Pie in the Sky[b/] now, and any country that has a show about a classy chef doing steak and kidney pies gets a pass.
I’ve had Ethiopian food in Berkeley, and it was pretty good.
I lived in the Congo for 9 moths, and based on what our local cook did the native cuisine was crepes. 
I don’t remember eating Congolese food, but then I got out of there with a stomach. It is hard to call it bad without actually eating it.
However, sometime ago a colleague and I went to Amsterdam for dinner, and look how we might we couldn’t find any Dutch restaurants. Indonesian, Hebrew, Spanish, all kinds of cuisine, just not Dutch. The cafeteria at the AT&T/Philips plant did Indonesian food. We finally ate in a hotel restaurant, which I figure was as close as we were going to get. A country embarrassed by its cuisine in its capital must surely be in the running.
If you don’t like fish or seaweed you can run into some problems with traditional Japanese cuisine. Also, what insane person decided that tiny fish (with heads!) should be dried and sprinkled on nice safe rice? He was probably a drinking buddy of the inventor of Herring…
(Disclaimer: I love many individual dishes in Japanese cuisine. I just understand why a person would have issues with the more traditional cuisine as a whole.)