Top TenPlates

How this works

Ten is an argument, not a fact.

No ranking of a country's food is going to be right. The point is to make an honest attempt, show the working, and cook every single one.

  1. Listen

    Every country starts with weeks of reading and watching — what people post, what they argue about, what turns up at every family table and every street corner. Not what a travel magazine says a country eats.

  2. Narrow

    Ten is a cruel number. A dish earns a slot by being named unprompted, over and over, by people from that country. Regional treasures get written about even when they miss the cut.

  3. Cook

    Every recipe here is cooked in a home kitchen before it goes up — usually more than once, sometimes badly the first time. If a step matters, it is because it went wrong without it.

  4. Write

    Weights in grams and cups, times that account for the thing actually heating up, and a note about what I learned. No life story before the ingredients.

Where the rankings come from

They come from consensus, not authority. I am not from most of the places I cook, and the ranking reflects what a country's own cooks and eaters say loudest — not what I liked best.

That means I will get things wrong, and that the tenth slot is always the one worth fighting about. If a dish is missing, it is almost certainly because I have not heard enough people name it yet. Tell me.

About the recipes

Every recipe is written from scratch after cooking it, not adapted from someone else's page. Where a dish has a definitive traditional method, I follow it and say so. Where families disagree, I pick one version, name it, and mention the others.

What's coming

The Americas first, north to south, then east across the Atlantic. Video is next after that — the same recipes, cooked on camera, so the parts that are hard to describe in a paragraph can just be shown.