What are your favorite 5 cuisines?

Diner
Pub
Hot Dog Cart
Ice Cream
Bakery

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Those are foods, not cuisines, no?

Fun list in any event.

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No Malaysian/Peranakan??

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My five for eating in restaurants.

Italian (preference for Northern cuisine, from Tuscany up, and especially Emilia Romagna and Veneto). Also because of the wines. I just love Italian food (but only in Italy…)

Cantonese (love how they are using a wide array of cooking techniques, from deep frying to blanching, and also just when making one dish; using every part of the animal, focus on vegetables, and just general technique and recipes from older generations being kept alive)

General South East Asian (Singapore, Thailand especially)

Spain (amazing seafood, very bold flavours)

French, mostly because of the interplay with their wines.

(Special mention at number 6 for Japanese)

At home, I mostly cook French and Italian because where I live in Northern Europe I can get their local produce, and their cuisine fits the local weather. If I were to live in Hong Kong for example I would be cooking Cantonese, and hardly any French or Italian.

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Hot Dog & Ice cream are a stretch but I’ll defend Diner, Pub (though I should’ve said Irish/English Pub), & Bakery. :yum:

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Diner cuisine.

Hot Dog Cuisine, definitely.

Hot Dogs! I want a Sonoran hot dog right now.

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Measured against the other cuisines, no. :smile:

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It’s so hard to find good ones in Toronto that the few we have automatically get a bigger following than a Cantonese restaurant because we have so many Cantonese restaurants and so few Malaysian or Peranakan options. Even fewer Macanese, if any, right now. Very little in terms of Indonesian, except for my friend’s 2 Dutch Indonesian places.

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Not sure about bakery, since offerings will vary wildly depending on the country.

For Malaysian restaurants, I guess it’s always easy to get a larger slice of the pie if there are fewer of you. Less competition.

I hear from Singaporean & Malaysian friends who’d been to Toronto that the Cantonese restaurants at your end are actually better than what we have here.

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I’ll just crib your list, and add mention’s of Hawai’ian, French, Mexican and Korean.

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(from Charles? Our friend? cc @THECHARLES ) I don’t know, and what do I know anyways? :joy: I will leave it to the experts.

(I know what I like, I’m a little obsessed with redang and laksa, and I’m seeking out a Hainanese chicken rice in TO. But the Singaporean spot/ French cheese shop in my neighborhood of Little Italy closes at 4 pm and I was too late yesterday)

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I’m a fan of everything in the nightshade family, too … save for tobacco.

For eggplant, Georgia (err Sakartvelo), Japan, China, and Bangladesh also do it well.

And re: the tomato – perhaps my favorite food – Andalucia.

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I loved checking Hawaiian regional dishes off my list, on my first visit to Maui, Kauai and Oahu, in 2019.

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Nowadays, almost all of my favorite cuisines have a ’ Japanese ’ component influence to them, be they French/Japanese fusion, Nordic/Japanese fusion, Spanish/Japanese fusion, Peruvian/Japanese fusion…etc!!
Only one that managed to escape this invasion is ‘Chinese-Cantonese’?!!

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Oh no, dear Charles, to his credit, has never, ever hinted that Toronto’s Cantonese spots are better than those in Singapore.

But it’s almost an accepted notion in Singapore that one can get better Cantonese in Toronto, due to the proliferation of good HK chefs over there, plus the availability of good produce/ingredients.

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I don’t know that are produce is that great here in the Greater Toronto Area to be honest. I have had some nice meals north of Toronto, especially a couple Charles organized. I can’t say my own experiences with Cantonese Chinese food in Toronto have been better than my favourite Cantonese meals in NYC, Vancouver or San Francisco. I think California and BC are blessed with better produce than Toronto.

I haven’t been to HK or Singapore yet. My high school friend and her family run several Michelin-starred Cantonese restaurants in HK and Macao. I have always wanted to visit, and I should have done that 20 years ago, when I was travelling more!

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I’d not eaten enough Cantonese in NYC to know, but for San Francisco, where I lived and worked from 2006-2011, I must say that the best ones I’d had weren’t really up to standards of Singapore’s best ones.

I go to R&G Lounge a lot, especially for their salt & pepper Dungeness crab. We don’t get Dungeness crab as readily in Singapore, and prices can be stratospheric if we do find them. But the cooking at R&G Lounge won’t make it to the top ten Cantonese places in Singapore. My other go-to places were Great Eastern in SF Chinatown and Peony in Oakland Chinatown, but both would rate as “neighborhood eateries” with very rustic cooking in Singapore or Malaysia.

I’m still hoping to come out to Toronto or Vancouver one of these days.

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I think I visited Peony, around 15 years ago. I haven’t visited Oakland much since 2010.

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Salt & pepper is first rate. The off-menu dish that must be ordered and paid for in advance is the deboned whole fried chicken stuffed with sticky rice:

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