Top 5 cuisines with greatest influence on world palate

by Anshul
12 comments
a plate of food on a table

Points Miles and Bling (blog) contains referral or affiliate links. The blog receives a small commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your continued support. Credit Card issuers are not responsible for maintaining or monitoring the accuracy of information on this website. For full details, current product information, and Terms and Conditions, click the link included.

Perhaps the oldest and simplest cultural exchange one can undertake is trying world cuisines. Essentially, a plate of food can offer insight into its origin’s culture and local customs. It’s 2023, an excellent time to update our list of the top 5 cuisines with the most significant influence on the world palate. A recent study by pickyeaterblog.com determined the most popular cuisines, meal types, and availability by analyzing Instagram hashtags, mentions, and the number of restaurants (82,995) in the top 50 cities serving top cuisines.

Top 5 cuisines with greatest influence on world palate

All graphs and data presented below are presented as shared by ‘Picky Eater Blog’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found that Italian cuisine is the most popular worldwide, followed by Japanese, Indian, Korean, and Mexican. Italian and Japanese cuisines have been tagged more than 20 million times on Instagram and Indian cuisine with more than 12 million tags.

Top 5 cuisines

Most popular cuisines around the world

Regarding the most popular meal type, the humble Pizza was the runaway winner, with over 60M mentions on Instagram. An American icon, the Barbecue, with over 40M Instagram tags, was placed second, followed by Brunch, Sushi, and Seafood.

Top 5 cuisines

Most popular meal type around the world

The study also looked at the most typical restaurants in the top most visited cities and found that Chinese restaurants were the most common eateries, closely followed by Italian, Indian, and Japanese restaurants.

Top 5 cuisines

Most common restaurants found in the top visited cities

Given the data discussed above, it’s not hard to see why the top 5 cuisines that influenced the world palate the most in 2023 are;

  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Chinese
  • Indian
  • American

In 2019, we also highlighted Joel Waldfogel’s paper, ‘Dining out as a cultural trade,’ using restaurant listings from TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Tabelog and sales figures from Euromonitor to estimate world’ trade-in cuisines from 52 countries. He denoted domestic consumption of foreign cuisine as an ‘import’ and foreign consumption of domestic cuisine as an ‘export.’ He summarized the largest “net exporters” and “net importers” of world cuisine.

The graph below, summarizes the largest “net exporters” and “net importers” of world cuisine, according to Waldfogel’s study, as published in The Economist.

Top 5 cuisines

Waldfogel also made two exciting observations;

  • Thatthe market for food at restaurants is roughly ten times larger than the markets for music and film
  • That “cuisine trade patterns more closely resemble migration patterns than patterns of food trade or patterns arising from the extent of arable land in origin countries. “

Influence on world palate aside, my personal top 5 cuisines are;

  • Turkish
  • Thai
  • Mexican
  • Vietnamese
  • Japanese

Are your favorite cuisines represented in the studies above? Share with a comment below.

12 comments

Cuisine - What are Five Major Cuisines around the world? - Read n' Cook April 10, 2021 - 6:00 am

[…] All the countries spread across the world have a food culture that is broadly categorized into 5 major cuisines. This classification has been done also because these five major cuisines have influenced the human […]

Reply
Cuisine - What are Five Major Cuisines around the world? - readncook April 8, 2021 - 6:01 am

[…] All the countries spread across the world have a food culture that is broadly categorized into 5 major cuisines. This classification has been done also because these five major cuisines have influenced the human […]

Reply
Cuisine - What are five major Cuisines around the world? - CooknBowl April 5, 2021 - 1:41 pm

[…] All the countries spread across the world have a food culture that is broadly categorized into 5 major cuisines. This classification has been done also because these five major cuisines have influenced the human […]

Reply
Are There Qualifications Needed To Teach Food Cooking In The UK? – SHB March 17, 2021 - 8:49 pm

[…] need to  also decide on what kind of class you want to make by thinking thoroughly about what cuisine you would be focusing on; Chinese, British, what exactly do you want to specialize in, would […]

Reply
Angela Fan February 23, 2021 - 2:41 pm

LMAO. American??? Did you completely forget about French cuisine? What kind of a shitty list is this? So many wonderful cuisines in the world and you think American is influential.

Reply
Points Miles and Bling February 23, 2021 - 3:14 pm

Looks like you went straight to the list. Here is the context to that list;

‘Joel Waldfogel’s paper, titled ‘Dining out as a cultural trade’, used restaurant listings from TripAdvisor, Yelp, Tabelog and sales figures from Euromonitor to estimate world ‘trade’ in cuisines from 52 countries. He denotes domestic consumption of foreign cuisine as an ‘import’ and foreign consumption of domestic cuisine as an ‘export’. The balance between the net export and import dictated the top 5 cuisines that influence the world palate.’

Cheers!

Reply
Trildon October 14, 2022 - 4:25 pm

Thank you, yes. The five major culinary cuisines are French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese and Indian.

Reply
Francis February 6, 2021 - 9:19 pm

Complete B.S. list. Chinese for Eastern, French for Western. American cuisine? LOL. “Export” has nothing to do with “influence”.

Reply
Francis February 6, 2021 - 10:32 pm

There’s a big difference between “influential”, and whichever cuisine you like the best. Everyone like Italian food (probably my own favorite) because it’s heavily pasta-based and who doesn’t like pasta? Influential no. Not since the Renaissance, maybe. Not the way Escoffier, Nouvelle Cuisine and a few contemporary French Chefs changed contemporary western cuisine in terms of technique and innovation. There’s a reason why so many well-known Chefs today (including Asian Chefs) are French-trained and it has nothing to do with French food being “the best”. Not having France on your list is a joke.

Reply

Leave a Comment

You may also like