Germans Love David Hasselhoff / Food

Particular dishes/ingredients/brands

• Before we go anywhere else with this, we might as well say that a good alternate title for this article would be Everybody Loves Pizza. Seriously. Despite its humble origins in Italy, pizza these days is an incredibly international dish, and has spread to the proverbial four corners of the Earth. Originally just some yeast-raised bread with some oil and simple toppings (some vegetables, maybe some herbs, maybe a little cheese), the modern form with tomatoes was already international before leaving Italy, the result of the Columbian Exchange, as tomatoes were initially from the New World. Italian immigrants to the United States in the 19th century brought their dish to their new country, particularly New York, where pizza really took off.
  
  Of course, the United States was really just the start. Everywhere pizza went, the locals loved it. It seems that the combination of cheese, bread, tomato sauce, and toppings is just appealing to human beings, even if none of these things are traditional in their culture (observe Japan). The sheer range of perception is also interesting: in the US it is a beloved, common,^note On any given day, thirteen percent of Americans have eaten at least one slice of pizza. If every one of these people had just one slice—and considering that Americans tend to have larger meals than most, they probably didn't—that's nearly 42 million slices. Every day. comfort food (and a major source of Misplaced Regionalism); in aforementioned Japan, it is considered more of a luxurious exotic item (a bit like how Americans saw getting sushi after people got over being squicked out by the "raw fish" thing and before it started appearing in convenience stores). Seriously, if we ever meet aliens and they ask to have a sample of "human food", pizza is probably our best candidate.
  
  The key to pizza's success is the sheer variety it can come in: what constitutes as a "bread", "cheese" and especially "toppings" is really up to local tastes. Every country that ever got its hands on the stuff has put some native food or favorite unrelated import on top of the pizza: This ranges from Japanese katsuobushi shavings (that's shaved pieces of dried fermented skipjack tuna or bonito) to Finnish sautéed reindeer to Eastern Mediterranean pastirma (that's wind-dried spiced beef) to the Brazilian habit of adding catupiry cheese spread to the topping. The extreme flexibility in toppings means that pizza can accommodate almost any diet, which helped its spread across the globe. People who can't consume dairy or gluten can use alternative cheeses and crusts. The ease of preparing one also helps, as you only need an enclosed space and a heat source (a.k.a. "an oven", which are quite widely available anywhere with the relatively minimal level of modernity needed to have developed a taste for pizza).
  
  China is an atypical case, however, in that pizza as it is eaten in North America or Europe, has historically been largely considered unappealing and unpalatable, as it contains cheese and tomato. While tomato is relatively common in the modern Chinese kitchen—tomato-and-egg stir fry and tomato-and-egg soup are very popular, southern China has had all kinds of interesting uses for tomatoes (especially pickled) for centuries, and tomato ketchup is ubiquitous (having been introduced in the late 19th century)^note As an aside, this means that anyone saying that "authentic" sweet and sour pork/chicken/what have you does not have ketchup is deeply mistaken: in modern China, most recipes for the "classic" Cantonese gulu sauce call for ketchup, and have done since no later than the 1950s. The quantity is admittedly a bit less than seen in Westernized Chinese cuisine, but it's still definitely a primary ingredient: it stands in for a jam made from Chinese hawberries that makes up about a quarter of the traditional sauce. The hawberry jam is substantially more expensive, even in China, and so only the most obsessively traditionalist cooks in the country bother with it. Additionally, chefs in China making other regions' versions of sweet-and-sour sauce (like Northeastern guobao sauce—traditionally made of just vinegar, sugar, and salt) will often add a touch of ketchup for color.—cheese is less so,^note Except for a few areas. Setting aside the dairy-eating Mongols and Turks of the north and northwest, there's a small tradition of cheesemaking in the area around Shunde in Guangdong, which centers around a kind of pressed water buffalo farmer's cheese not unlike Indian paneer. Also, Western cheeses are known in Hong Kong, where melting cheeses are ubiquitous in chachaantengs, but we're getting ahead of ourselves and the combination is thus seen as kind of weird. Pizza Hut, before expanding to China, was warned that selling pizza to Chinese would have a high chance of failure for these reasons, so the company produced special Chinese-oriented recipes, which had less cheese and tomato or substituted them for other ingredients (such as the more familiar mayonnaise in place of cheese), as well as toppings based on foods more familiar to the Chinese, such as soy sauce or fish. Pizza Hut also made the pizzas smaller as fast food in China is commonly eaten while walking around outside and the large American pizzas are unwieldy.^note Of course, in the "homeland" of American pizza on the East Coast, pizza is also commonly eaten walking around (or at least standing around) outside, and is therefore commonly sold by the slice rather than/as well as the whole pie. "Dollar slices" (these days more likely to be $2 or even $3) to be bought at the shop and eaten on the go are a veritable NYC institution, and the other Northeastern cities from Boston to DC have plenty of similar shops. It's also common in Italy; Rome in particular is famous for pizza al taglio ("pizza by the slice", where said slice is sold, interestingly, by weight), especially on the beach at Ostia (Rome's port/seaside area on the Tyrrhenian coast), where beachgoers will buy from the shop and walk over to their spot on the beach to enjoy the snack (often with a cold beer). Why this (relatively obvious) method of selling pizza as a hand-portable street food wasn't brought to China is unclear; either the possibility of selling by the slice never occurred to the major chains (which are all based in the U.S. Midwest, where the pizza business is oriented around whole pies for family sit-down dinner or delivery; unlike the Northeast, in the Midwest pizza by the slice is a niche market limited to late-night joints in college towns and maybe Chicago) or the economics of trying that model (which does rely heavily on predicting what toppings will be in demand and baking pies ahead accordingly) in China rather than making smaller pizzas didn't pencil out. Nowhere was this market research more valuable than the counter-example of Domino's, which sold pizzas unchanged from the American style: They were only able to sell mainly to Americanophiles and those who had lived in the US for some time and were thus used to foods with a lot of cheese and tomato in them. To everyone else, it was Foreign Queasine.
  
  However, this is changing rapidly; as of about 2020, "actual" tomato-sauce-and-cheese pizza is increasingly common in Chinese cities (where the vast majority of modern Chinese live). This especially true among the younger generations, who often snottily dismiss the earlier Pizza Hut offerings as inauthentic and rave about getting "real" American-style (or if they're extra-snooty, Italian-style) pizza with cheese and tomato sauce.^note It helps in this respect that a truly massive cohort of young Chinese—we're talking millions—went to the United States (and Canada, where US-style pizza is just as ubiquitous) for their university and/or graduate educations and pretty much had to eat the weird pizza to survive, or at least get along. A smaller but still huge contingent studied in Europe, where pizza, while not as ubiquitous (except in Italy of course), was still commonplace. While some put down roots abroad, most of them came home to China, bringing their tastes with them—and evangelized for them. (They also commanded better salaries because of their Western educations, and the market moved to tap into their tastes.) It's similar to how sushi in the West went from Foreign Queasine to haute cuisine. Local pizza joints also seem to pop up every day in modern China (usually boasting some rather substandard crust and cheese but interesting toppings).
• Another dish that managed to break all barriers is the hamburger, created in the United States (though the ground beef steak has been created elsewhere, including Mongolia and the namesake German city of Hamburg) but popular everywhere, particularly with the ubiquity of McDonald's.
• KitKats are so popular in Japan that they've spawned a variety of Japan-exclusive flavors because of the similarity to the Japanese phrase "kitto katsu", which translates to "surely win". Naturally, sales skyrocket during exams. The varieties have become a big draw for international tourists who want to buy and try all the different flavors.
• Foie gras was originally (more or less)^note Foie gras was actually known in the ancient Mediterranean world; the livers of fattened ducks and geese were favourites of both Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Roman gourmets. Indeed, the words for "liver" in modern Romance languages actually comes from a Latin word roughly meaning "figged", referring to the ancients' preference for using figs to force-feed the birds (rather than the modern process of using grain). However, the ancient process became Lost Technology after the fall of the Roman Empire, and was rediscovered independently by the medieval Ashkenazim. an Ashkenazi Jewish delicacy, produced as a by-product of fattening ducks and geese for producing schmaltz.^note Schmaltz is rendered poultry fat, traditionally used in meat dishes by most Ashkenazi (i.e. Central, Eastern, and Northwestern European Jews) because lard isn't kosher, butter is a dairy product that can't be mixed with meat, and vegetable oils like olive oil or sesame oil (which Middle Eastern or Mediterranean Jews used) were unavailable in Central/Eastern Europe. Before you ask, they didn't use beef or mutton tallow or dripping because most of that is also prohibited as chelev (fat that's supposed to be dedicated to God in Temple sacrifices and therefore forbidden for Jews to eat; even though the Temple is long gone, the prohibition remains). The amount of non-chelev fat on a cow or sheep is so small as to render it more trouble than it's worth to extract, so kosher butchers across history generally haven't bothered (they usually sell the cuts that can't be made kosher cheaply to their less-picky Gentile neighbors). Also, schmaltz is a bit on the heavy side as foodstuffs go, hence the Hebrew-derived Yiddish-English term "schmaltz" for what we call glurge. The rules of kashrut meant the Jews couldn't do very much with the liver^note Under kashrut, liver is considered to be "mostly blood". Since eating "blood" is forbidden, it must be prepared in a way that Jewish tradition regards as removing the "blood", which, generally speaking, means grilling or broiling it (techniques modern chefs regard as too aggressive to deal with the delicate flavors of foie gras). (not that it kept them from trying), but their Gentile neighbors—especially the French—went crazy for it. After that, foie gras became a worldwide delicacy, due to the international reputation of French cuisine.
• Potatoes. Indigenous to Peru, they're in almost every meal in most of Europe today, and at one point, Ireland (we all know how great that turned out). This is mostly because potatoes thrive almost anywhere, so they're basically a noxious weed. A delicious noxious weed. Not to mention, Jewish people traditionally eat potato pancakes fried in oil around Hanukkah.
  • While in Liège (Belgium) they came up with frying strips of potato in oil (according to tradition originally as a cheap substitute for fried fish, or a way to cool down dangerously hot oil/fat), a method that soon became very popular in France, other parts of Europe and of course America... and from these bases, "French fried potatoes" went on to conquer the world (or at least Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia).
  • Slavs in general are BIG on potatoes ^note they really thrive in the often cool and damp Eastern European summers, and are much more reliable than grain which can be prone to bad harvests at times, but the Belorussians give the Irish a run for their money. They are so fond of potatoes that an entirely common and accepted nickname for a Belorussian is "Bulbash", that is, "Potatoman". This can even be seen among the WoT/WoWP/WoWS fandom, where Wargaming.Net (a Belorussian company) is frequently referred to as "Kartoshka" ("Potato" in Russian).
  • In keeping with Germans and Poles being alike without realizing it (both are also huge on sausage and bread), Germans love potatoes. This goes so far that "Kartoffel" (the German word for potato - though there are more than a dozen terms in several dialects) is actually a more common term to describe a German (and in some contexts a mild slur) than the "Kraut" Americans like to associate Germans with. German knows varieties to prepare potatoes that some other languages don't even have words for, and even the traditional Christmas or Sunday meal would not be complete without potato dumplings, boiled potatoes or some other variant of the delicious tubers. Thus, Hugo's obsession with them in Ultra Street Fighter IV is Truth in Television rather than a character quirk added by the designers.
• Related to fried potatoes: fried fish, in the sense of that great British icon, fish and chips. While the combination is impeccably British (although where in Britain someone put two and two together^note Or perhaps "one and one together" to use the Dubliner's term for the dish is a bit contentious), the idea of frying battered fish in oil is generally agreed not to be native to Britain but rather an import from Spain, brought to Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries by Jews fleeing the Inquisition.^note Pescado frito—the Spanish term for fish battered and fried in oil (traditionally a light olive oil)—is popular with Sephardic Jews for a Shabbat meal, as it can be cooked during the day on Friday and still be tasty (with its light, crisp crust still intact) at lunchtime on Saturday. It is also pareve (to use a Yiddish term, which the Sephardim wouldn't understand), and can therefore be eaten no matter whether you're having dairy or meat in other parts of the meal (as long as you didn't put the fish and meat on the same plate, but now we're getting ahead of ourselves). The chips are, as noted, an import from Belgium (probably). However, Brits can take comfort that the typical side dish of mushy peas is something no one else in the world is willing to take responsibility for.
  • Fried fish became immensely popular in the American Gulf States thanks to the Spanish influence on Creole culture and the need for tasty meat alternatives during Lent. In the region, it's most commonly made using catfish dredged in seasoned cornmeal instead of dipped in batter.
  • Speaking of fried fish, the Filet-O-Fish may be the Butt-Monkey of the McDonald's menu in North America, but it is a perpetual hot item in the company's East Asian locations. To an east Asian, a hamburger is Foreign Queasine as that texture of ground beef is very rarely found in East Asian cooking (the East Asian kitchen prefers meats, including beef, to be very finely minced—much more finely than hamburger), but fried fish IS familiar and easy to understand, quite similar to the KFC example below.
• Tomatoes were introduced to Europe from South America in the 16th century (about 500 years ago) but are such an important part of so many cultures' cuisines you'd think they'd been there for thousands of years. A particularly extreme example is the Eastern Mediterranean, which only got tomatoes in the late 18th-early 19th century (highly delayed, and via Europe—the first confirmed report of a tomato in the Middle East was when the British consul in Aleppo in what is now Syria brought one sometime between 1799 and 1825). Ask a Turk or Lebanese or Egyptian or Iraqi (and particularly an Egyptian, whose cuisine today stereotypically consists of drowning vegetables and meat in a tomato sauce flavored with cumin and onions)^note Egypt regularly punches above its weight in tomato production and consumption, growing and eating way more tomatoes per capita than its (admittedly very large) population might suggest. In 2012, Egypt was the world's fifth-largest tomato producer, with a harvest of 8.6 million metric tons. As the Egyptian industry for processing food for export is, if not in its infancy, then certainly in its childhood, the vast majority of this production was for domestic consumption. Note also that in 2010-11, there had been a tomato shortage in Egypt that made national headlines when production dipped not that far below the levels achieved in 2012. The spike in tomato prices over the winter 2010-11 are commonly understood to have contributed to the general discontent that led to the Egyptian Revolution of January 2011. Yeah, Egyptians love tomatoes. to imagine their cuisine without tomatoes... they will have a very hard time indeed.
  • Speaking of tomatoes, as a matter of fact, tomatoes weren't actually a popular foodstuff for nearly two hundred years after they came to Europe, as they were believed to be poisonous ^note The leaves indeed are, and the fruits of the tomato look slightly similar to the poisonous fruits of various other members of the nightshade family, such as potato and, er, nightshade (with which Europeans were quite familiar), especially when unripe.
• Speaking of Egyptians, the country has developed a peculiar taste for ketchup, even putting it on things that Americans won't (pizza?) as well as many things Americans have never even heard of (like fitir, a traditional Egyptian filled pastry akin to börek, somewhat similar to pizza in that its savory forms include cheese and various other ingredients).^note Egyptian fitir shops typically also do pizza, usually including traditional fitir fillings as pizza toppings. Ketchup-flavored potato chips (sometimes under the moniker "tomato") are also very popular.
• Crepes are a massively popular street food in Japan, with a particularly strong association with Harajuku. Naturally, crepes are French—though the fillings and the style of rolling (into a cone shape easy to carry in one hand as street food) are distinctively Japanese. The convenient Japanese-style street crepes are starting to catch on in other parts of the world, too (visit your Friendly Local Chinatown—or Japantown or Koreatown—and you're fairly likely to find a shop that does crepes in this style).
• Oy! Chilis! Most any hot and spicy item in the world uses chilis these days—a relatively recent import from the Americas (the Andes and Caribbean). Imagine all you hotheads without your spice fix via chilis? A few standouts:
  • Modern Korean cuisine is famous for its predisposition to spiciness, with chilis becoming a key part of many staples (like kimchi). When the peppers first arrived in Korea in the 17th century, they were viewed with suspicion as a strange foreign item.
  • Many cuisines in modern Africa, particularly Nigeria, South Africa, Mozambique, and the cuisines of the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea) are noted for their extreme and creative use of hot chili peppers. The pepper they use—a strain called "African birdseye" or "piri-piri"—is derived from feral plants that colonized Africa after Europeans somehow left them in trade somewhere in the continent in the "Age of Discovery". Also, farmers across the continent tend to have pepper bushes around their fields—not necessarily to grow them for harvest (though they do do that), but because elephants (a major agricultural pest in Africa, as they will eat any crops they find and are hard to deter or kill because they're elephants^note They're very smart—probably the most intelligent terrestrial mammal other than humans and other great apes—which makes short work of most deterrence strategies, but they're also big and tough—the biggest and toughest on land, in fact—not to mention protected by environmental laws, so killing them is also out of the question (unless they're actively attacking someone, but that's another story).) hate chilis and anything that smells like them.
  • Indian cooking had long been favorable to "hot" flavors (black pepper was very popular before the arrival of chilis—indeed, the word "pepper" comes from the Sanskrit word pippali and originally referred only to long pepper), so it's no surprise that when the chili showed up on Indian shores, the Indian kitchen took to it like it had always been there. Also, like the Africans, Indians also have to deal with elephants as agricultural pests, and sure enough, they jumped right on using chilis as a deterrent. (This is how the insanely spicy Bengal and Assam chilis like the famous ghost pepper came to be—they weren't originally supposed to be eaten, as they were mainly ground up and spread on fence posts as elephant repellant.) Today, India is the largest producer, consumer, and exporter of chili peppers in the entire world.
  • On a related point (chili and paprika are botanically the same thing) bell peppers aka paprika are incredibly popular in Hungary, to the point that some people actually mistake them for a native plant of Hungary. And that despite that they can't withstand temperatures lower than 10°C - that means they have to be planted new for each season, whereas they last several years in their native tropics.
• Sushi seems to be especially prone to this. Mexicans love it, for instance, and it's seen as an elegant-ish food there. The fun part comes when the new culture localizes the food. Guacamole California rolls and chipotle dressing for your onigiri hmm-hmmm.
  • Venezuelans also love their sushi, to the point that fast food-esque sushi restaurants are in every mall in the country, and some chef created a plantain roll. The neighborhood of Los Palos Grandes in Caracas is so infamous for its high number of sushi restaurants, satirical blog El Chigüire Bipolar went to parody it
  • In any sizable Russian city you can't walk more than a couple of blocks without encountering a sushi joint. Most of them leave much to be desired, though, but it's the intent that counts.
  • Any supermarket in the U.S. will carry sushi in the deli section, albeit in rolls made with imitation crab meat rather than nigiri, and which vary widely in quality.
• Almonds have recently become quite popular in Asia particularly China and are seen as a healthy snack. This has led to an increase in almond production, which couldn't come at a worse time, as 80% of the world's supply of almonds are grown in California, an area hit extremely hard by a multiyear drought—and almonds are a rather water-intensive crop to begin with.
• Kinoko no Yama (Chocorooms) vs Takenoko no Sato (Chococones) cookies is a subject of fierce debate in Japan, with there even being a Japan-only Splatfest to settle things once and for all. Takenoko no Sato won. In America however, Chocorooms are the clear winner, to the point where Meiji stopped selling Chococones in America completely. Could be due to the fact that mushrooms are more familiar to American buyers than bamboo shoots are.
• Roast beef. While beef is certainly not unknown to Asians—for instance, Korea is noted for its barbecued-beef culture, certain regions (e.g. Sichuan) are famous in China for their use of beef, and of course Japan has its famous Kobe beef—roast beef is mostly a western thing. Asians appear to love this idea - especially at ordering a roast beef sandwich at a Subway.
• Historical example: Peppercorns. It used to be an exotic spice and a sign of wealth, and Europeans loved it. While it's nowhere near as popular today, it's more or less part of western cuisine, although not quite as much as salt.
  • It was once so rare and so popular that peppercorns could be used in exchange. As they declined in value, some contracts measured in value of pepper became a legal byword.
  • Roman traders frequently sailed to India to trade gold for pepper.
• Lutefisk seems to be more popular in the United States (particularly Minnesota) and Canada than the Nordic nations it originated in, where it is eaten mainly for special occasions during the holidays.
• Spam is quite popular in the Pacific. This dates back to World War II and the immediate postwar period, when the US Armed Forces issued large quantities of Spam in ration packs, often sold surplus to locals or simply provided it outright in the form of aid (or, in the case of Hawaii, made it relatively easy to obtain under wartime rationing), while on the mainland it's considered a cheap food source for broke families at best and Mystery Meat at worst. In the U.K., it was equally reviled, with a famous Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch lampooning the product, which became a term for unsolicited email because of it, though the term was in use among amateur radio operators beforehand.
  • Filipinos love Spam. There are restaurants that serve nothing but different recipes heavily featuring Spam. (Spamgetti, Spamsteak, Spam soup, etc.)
  • Spam also has a major following in Hawaii, compared to the rest of the US. Spam "sushi" (actually Spam musubi^note a type of onigiri, a plain steamed rice ball which is topped instead of stuffed like the normal onigiri, as the rice isn't sushi rice), in particular, is a popular state food (even Barack Obama, a Hawaii native, is a known connoisseur of the dish).
  • While not the brand Spam per se, Korea and China really really like the canned ham (so much that cans of Spam are sometimes given as a luxury gift in South Korea). Its virtues are a strong salty flavour (excellent with rice) and that it fries easily with all that fat in it. For instance, in Hong Kong it's used as a condiment for breakfast macaroni in broth.
• Cashews. The seed of this Northeast Brazilian tree is of course famous and popular everywhere as a delicious nut,^note OK, botany nerds: not a true nut, but a seed. It's a culinary nut, though. but the places it is most widely grown and most creatively used are far, far away from the Amazon. The major ones are tropical Africa and South and Southeast Asia, which have an even better climate for growing cashews than Brazil—of the top ten producers of cashews today, Brazil comes in a rather distant tenth. Beyond that, the Indians and Southeast Asians have been particularly creative with the crop: adding it to curries, using it to thicken desserts, grinding it with sugar into fudge-like confections, eating the sprouts of germinated nuts, putting interesting mixes of spices on roasted nuts, and—most peculiarly—even making liquor out of the "cashew apple" (the sweet, fragrant, but delicate accessory fruit out of which the cashew "nut" grows).
• Kebab is quite popular in Austria and Germany (known there as Döner Kebap or simply Döner), and you can buy it pretty much on every street corner. Kebab as it is sold there (mainly in a sandwich, with veggies, salad and sauce) was even invented in Germany, in order to adapt to the more hectic German culture.
  • A special variety of Kebab is very popular in Mexico and served in tacos, known as "Taco al Pastor" or "taco de adobada" in Baja California; the main difference being that the kebab is made with pork. Its invention is mainly due to Lebanese immigrants who brought shawarma recipes back in the 1960s and then adapted them to local cuisine, giving birth to the al pastor. (The Lebanese immigrants to Mexico were mostly Catholic, so they had no issue with using pork.)
  • While kebab and pizza are universally popular, the combination (pizza with kebab) is popular in Norway and Sweden, though largely unknown elsewhere (some local pizza-and-fitir joints in the Arab world are known to put shawarma on pizza as a topping, but it's not quite the same).
  • Kebab is VERY popular in Finland, and there are many variations of kebab dishes, from being served with fries, rice, sort-of "bread crumbs" as iskender kebab. Or together with some salad ingredients as "rolled kebab" (known as rullakebab or kebabrulla in Finland). Sufficed to say, it's extremely popular here.
  • Kebabs are very popular in urban areas of Australia, particularly Melbourne and Sydney due to the large Lebanese immigrant population, along with Australians of all other backgrounds' appreciation for a late night kebab after a long night out. In addition to the traditional doner kebab roll, Australian kebab shops have gained global fame in recent years for the HSP (Halal Snack Pack) - essentially a layer of kebab meat on top of a bed of chips and grated cheese (optional) and topped off with the "Holy Trinity" of BBQ, garlic and chilli sauce.
• Heinz Baked Beans are very popular in the United Kingdom, where they're considered an essential part of the "full English breakfast". It's also used in the staple dish "beans on toast", which is baked beans served on toast, considered a Comfort Food the way a grilled cheese sandwich is stateside. As with Kraft Dinner in Canada, Heinz Baked Beans' popularity, and beans on toast with it, is largely a legacy of World War II-era rationing. This is in direct contrast to the product's home country, the United States, where they haven't been sold since 1928 outside of specialty stores focusing on British goods and the odd supermarket with a "British food" aisle catering to expatriates and the occasional anglophile (and even then, it's imported from Britain).^note Baked beans are still made and sold in the US, of course, but other companies chased Heinz out of the market in 1928. The product's popularity has been immortalized in pop culture, most notably by The Who. It's also stereotyped outside the U.K. as an example of "inedible British cuisine." We should also note that the British mania for tinned baked beans in general also represents this trope: baked beans originated in 17th-century colonial New England as a way of using the beans—a crop indigenous to the Americas—that the Natives had taught the immigrant Europeans to grow, in a manner that the immigrants found tasty and used ingredients New Englanders found plentiful (hence the use of molasses and salt pork; salt pork was relatively inexpensive, owing to the good pig-raising land in rural New England and the industry in salt pork for the shipping trade, and New England being a major depot for molasses coming from the Caribbean, that was cheap, plentiful, and tasty with salt pork and beans).^note Remember, "Molaaaassess, to rummm, to slaaaaaves".... The dish was (and remains) a traditional New England meal,^note The Boston version in particular was invented by the Puritans as a way of avoiding doing work on the Sabbath, as you could dump everything in the pot on Saturday evening and not have to worry about food on Sunday but preserved in cans it first made its way to Old England in the 1880s as a foreign delicacy.
• The rainbow cookie was invented by Italian-Americans, hence the Italian flag motif, but it really caught on with the Jewish population, who modified it slightly to be Kosher. Today, you're just as likely to find a rainbow cookie at a Jewish deli as you would an Italian bakery.
• Ever since the early 1990s, Shaworma (midway between a true Arab Shawarma and a Turkish Döner Kebab) has been wildly popular in Romania, found on practically every street corner, sometimes in 3-4 shops clumped together door to door and all of them crowded at the same time, so popular that it became the butt of jokes as "the food which lowest classes can afford".
• Due to the fact that more than half the Jewish population of Israel comes from Arab countries, in addition to a sizable Palestinian minority, falafel and hummus have become de facto national dishes in Israel. Of course, there are a lot of Arabs outside of Israel who aren't happy about this.
• Camembert is the most popular kind of cheese in Japan, and takes up the most of the cheese shelf space in grocery stores and cheese shops. In France, Camembert is quite popular, but usually overshadowed by other styles outside its native Normandy.
• Falafel and hummus are both quite popular in America. Falafel is a little more popular around New York (especially New York City, where the falafel cart is basically the second coming of the traditional New York "dirty water" hot dog cart) and hummus is especially popular for its health benefits. Pretty much every grocery store you visit in the states will carry hummus in the deli.
• Halal carts. Beginning in the 1990s, Middle Eastern immigrants in New York City started selling platters of rice topped with halal chicken or gyro and pita bread. These carts have become so widespread that they're pretty much a hallmark of New York cuisine, and they've spread along the East Coast (they're a dime a dozen in Jersey City, Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.).
• Kosher food is popular with non-Jews, simply due to its perceived quality and wholesomeness.
  • One particular example: the stereotypical Irish dish in the United States is corned beef and cabbage; Irish immigrants to the U.S. modified bacon, cabbage, and potato dishes to use kosher corned beef because "bacon" is a very different thing in the U.S. as opposed to Europe.^note There was an ancient tradition of corned beef native to Ireland—salted beef is mentioned in several medieval Gaelic texts. (And it might even have been consumed regularly with cabbage, cabbage being ubiquitous in Irish cooking for as long as we have records.) However, the tradition of eating salted beef disappeared over time as the (large and productive) Irish cattle industry became increasingly oriented towards exporting beef and dairy to England (and to a lesser extent Scotland, Wales, and the British colonies across the Atlantic) under the Protestant Ascendancy. By the 19th century, what "corned beef" was being made in Ireland would have been salt beef for the Royal Navy and bully beef for the British Army. American bacon is made from fatty pork belly (which will pretty much disintegrate in boiled dishes), while Irish bacon is meatier back bacon made from pork loin. The key thing to understand here is that (in very broad terms), the relative prices of pork and beef depend on the relative availability of grazing land for cattle: where there's lots of room for cows to roam, beef becomes cheaper, but when there's less grazing land available (or more to the point, when the grazing land is converted for growing crops), beef gets more expensive and pork becomes the meat of choice.^note Sheep and goats don't generally factor into this, as they tend to be raised in rough, hilly, or otherwise marginal terrain poorly suited to raising cows or pigs—or crops, for that matter. When the first large Irish wave started to arrive in America in the 1840s-50s, America's western lands had recently been opened up, with vast open spaces that could not be effectively used for raising crops on a large scale but could hold a lot of cattle. Meanwhile, back bacon was harder to come by in the U.S. because it was made from pork loin, a relatively prime cut; back bacon producers had to compete with butchers trying to sell loin roasts and chops to the wealthy (or at least to the moderately well-off, which the new Irish immigrants weren't). As a result, the cheapest cuts of beef were cheaper than back bacon, while the cheapest bacon (the classic American streaky bacon from pork belly), while cheaper than the beef, wouldn't work in boiled/stewed dishes. At the same time, large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews from Central Europe (particularly Germany and Austria-Hungary) were arriving at the same time and busily turning briskets (a cheap cut) into corned beef, which was meaty enough to match Irish bacon, and so the Jews' new Irish neighbors started using it.
  • Hebrew National's beef sausages really caught on as well, as it had a higher level of quality control than its competitors due to adherence to kashrut (kosher law) while treating its employees well and priced its output competitively. Nowadays, non-Jews buy Hebrew National sausages at far higher quantities than the original intended Jewish audience.^note Some of this is due to controversy over how well it actually followed kashrut once bought up by ConAgra, though it still has a major audience in Jewish communities with looser or more forgiving interpretations of kashrut.
• Baumkuchen may have Central European origins, but since it was brought into Japan by a German baker Karl Juchheim (whose political views were unfortunately quite suspect; he was Driven to Suicide when Japan surrendered in August 1945), it became something more loved in Japan than in Germany.
• Fettuccine Alfredo is much more popular in America than in Italy, where it was invented in early 20th century Rome by restaurateur Alfredo di Lelio. The original is basically a way of preparing pasta (tossing it with butter and parmigiano until the cheese melts), whereas the American version uses a sauce prepared separately with cream. As such, the sauce can be served on anything.
• Although Cincinnati-style chili (which usually includes cinnamon, allspice, etc., and is often served over hot dogs or spaghetti) is usually limited to, well, Cincinnati, the dish also has a small following in Kentucky and Indiana (which is no surprise, since Cincinnati is across the river from Kentucky and not far from Indiana) … and Florida, of all places. Actually not that surprising, considering that Florida is a popular tourism and retirement destination for people from the dish's home region. Cans of the stuff can also be found on supermarket shelves even in locations far removed from its home base, thanks largely to the fact that the country's biggest supermarket chain, Kroger,^*Biggest in the sense of biggest grocery-focused chain. The country's largest seller of groceries is Walmart, but it's really a discount department store that branched into groceries. is based in Cincy.
• Pasta, while originally Italian, is popular everywhere in the world, but especially in the U.S., primarily in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, where a large amount of Italian immigrants flocked there and made it one of the nation's most popular dishes. In the U.S., spaghetti is typically served with meat sauce or meatballs, something that is rarely done in Italy. Italian and American pasta recipes have diverged so much that Italians consider American pasta to be Foreign Queasine, often finding it inedible. (That said, "Italians find diasporan/foreign versions of Italian dishes inedible" is a meme/phenomenon on the Internet^note There's even a Twitter account dedicated to Italians Mad at Foodto the point where one wonders if the Italians are serious or just exaggerating for comedic effect.)
• Maggi cubes, which are originally from Switzerland, are a staple ingredient of most West African dishes, to the extent where there are lots of different flavor cubes for the African market. They're also popular in the Arab World and are similarly a staple from Marrakech to Muscat. Maggi cubes are also in competition with the similar (German) Knorr cubes in Latin America.
• Burritos, and tortillas made from wheat flour in general, are not a popular or particularly traditional food item in many parts of Mexico (generally, wheat is only grown in the northern parts of the country such as Chihuahua). In los Estados Unidos, they're the most popular "Mexican" foodstuff, with "breakfast" or "Mission-style" burritos being offered by many "mainstream" American restaurants. (The fact that the wheat-growing and cattle-raising northern regions of Mexico are the ones closest to the US may have something to do with the popularity of burritos north of the border; for a long time, the Mexicans an American was most likely to interact with were northerners.) Ironically, the popularity of the burrito in the US has increased its popularity in Mexico, as migrants returning home seem to miss them.
• The McDonald's McRib is, of course, the product of an American company (and may have been the result of US military research), and is also a popular sandwich with a cult following in many countries, but in most countries that serve it, it is only served periodically. In Germany, meanwhile, the McRib is so popular (and cheap, considering Germany's rate of pork production), it's the only country to serve the sandwich year-round.
• Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, while fairly popular and well-known in its native US, has been elevated to an iconic, nearly "national dish" status in Canada, where it is known as "Kraft Dinner" or "KD"—the legacy of World War II-era rationing, when the product gained incredible popularity in Canada for reasons that nobody's ever been able to fully explain to everyone's satisfaction. In fact, Canadians make up nearly a quarter of Kraft's weekly global sales of the product despite being only about 0.5% of the world's population. As with Heinz baked beans in the U.K., this phenomenon has been reflected in pop culture, such as with the Canadian characters Terrance and Phillip in South Park and Barenaked Ladies' "If I Had $1000000".
• Maize: Earth's Multipurpose Monocultured Crop:
  • The plant is native to North America, and it remains quite important in the North American diet—particularly in Mexico, where it was originally domesticated. However, the crop is today grown all over the world, mostly as animal feed.
  • More to the point of this trope, maize has completely taken over in Central and Southern Africa as the primary grain. This is kind of a big deal; in these parts of Africa (the lands inhabited by the Bantu peoples), meals traditionally revolve around a variously-named^note Wikipedia lists about 50 names used across Africa grain mush, of which you take a ball, flatten in your hand, and fill with other dishes. Historically, the all-important mush was made from millet or sorghum; today, it's all maize.
  • Similar to African mush, the Italian polenta was historically made with several different grains, including wheat, spelt, millet, and even chestnuts and chickpeas. Today, it's basically always made with maize. The same is also true of the Romanian grain mush mămăligă.
  • The Chinese kitchen has gone in big for corn in one specific form: cornstarch. Modern Chinese cooks use cornstarch in many if not most recipes, to the point where your typical home kitchen in China has a dedicated canister for it right by the stove (typically in a three-in-one combination canister with the other two compartments for salt and sugar). Cornstarch is used to thicken sauces, give texture and sheen to soups, help marinades bind to meats and vegetables, and help scrambled eggs and omelets stay moist. It's even used as a base for batters: if you've ever wondered why Chinese-style dishes based on chunks of battered fried chicken or pork have such a different crust from equivalent Western dishes, the basic reason is that the Chinese batter is typically based on a mixture of cornstarch (or some other kind of starch) and water or eggs (rather than the wheat flour used in most Western batters). (As an aside, this makes Chinese batter rather fun to mess around with, since it's basically the oobleck you played with in science class at school.)
    • As with the various forms of cornmeal mush in Africa and Europe, cornstarch came in as a cheaper/better substitute for a more traditional ingredient. Chinese cooks had historically used water chestnut starch (in the south) and mung bean starch (in the north) for these purposes, but today these are limited to specific dishes where their unique properties make them indispensable (e.g. Cantonese beef balls, which maintain their shape better with water chestnut starch).
    • Chinese cooks also like to use potato starch and tapioca starch for more or less the same purposes as cornstarch. They do have slightly different properties (for instance, when fried in a batter, potato starch makes for a slightly chewier coating, while cornstarch makes for a slightly crispier one), and potato starch might actually be slightly more common in Chinese kitchens (reports are conflicting), but these three starches are largely indistinguishable, and may be seen in the aforementioned canisters almost interchangeably based primarily on cost and the chef's habits. Naturally, both potato and tapioca are also New World products.
  • Additionally, virtually every culture in the world has taken a liking to corn on the cob, usually either grilled or boiled. Both preparations are traditional in its native Mexico, and while few prepare it exactly like Mexican elote (slathered with lime juice and mayonnaise^note Which, in Mexico, is itself usually made with lime juice instead of the more typical white vinegar and/or lemon juice and coated with salt and powdered chiles), "coat it in something fatty and add seasoning" is similarly common the world over.
• Hot dogs were invented in Germany, being derived from the Frankfurter Würstchen (literally, "little sausage from Frankfurt") traditionally made in Frankfurt-am-Main^note A very fine sausage with a delicate method of preparation, for centuries only made when a new Holy Roman Emperor was crowned (the coronation was always supposed to be in Frankfurt). (hence the term "frankfurter" for the sausage), with some influence from the similar Wiener Würstchen (literally, "little sausage from Vienna") (hence the alternate term "wiener"). They are more popular in America than they ever were back in Europe, where it became synonymous as the food consumed at ballparks everywhere. Meanwhile in Denmark the Rød pølse is a social institution and a Dane who has never eaten at one of the stalls selling them is a rare find indeed (outside of the increasingly common vegetarians/vegans and minority communities of Jews and Muslim who avoid pork).
  • Speaking of "Rød Pølse", Norwegians love them so much that a trip to Denmark is not complete without it.
• The croissant and its close relative, pain au chocolat, are originally Austrian, brought to France in the 1830s by a former officer in the Austrian Army named August Zang, who set up a Viennese-style bakery in Paris after his retirement from military life. Both croissants and pain au chocolat (and other things) are called viennoiserie ("things from Vienna") in French, but both are (1) stereotypically French to outsiders and (2) Comfort Food to many actual French (especially pain au chocolat, a common childhood after-school snack).
• Auguste Zang (of croissant fame) is also indirectly responsible for another French bakery tradition, the baguette: although the French have been making long loaves of bread for centuries (long, wide loaves date from at least the reign of Louis XIV, long, thin ones from the reign of Louis XV, and these loaves could get up to two meters by the 1860s), the specific form of the baguette is the result of the adoption of the steam oven or deck oven, introduced to France from Austria by Zang.^note That said, neither the term baguette nor the specific form we see today were used until 1920. Before then, if you told a Frenchman you wanted to make a sandwich with a baguette, he would wonder what sandwiches had to do with batons, and perhaps ask if you were a wizard and could make something more fancy with your magic wand. Nobody's quite sure how or why "baguette" came to describe the current form—a long bread, 65-100 cm long, 5-6 cm in diameter, made from a specific kind of lean dough, and baked in a deck oven—but suspicion is generally cast on a 1919 law banning bakeries from employing bakers between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. The opening time meant that bakeries needed a bread that could be baked in 2-3 hours or less—before the morning rush for breakfast bread—and the thin, long-but-not-too shape worked well under these constraints if you baked it in a deck oven and became standard. Presumably, once people began noticing that all the bread now looked like this, they started making joke names about them, of which calling them "batons" or "wands" of bread (baguette in French) stuck.
• Mont Blanc (a dessert of meringue covered in "vermicelli" of piped chestnut paste and topped with whipped cream, sometimes on a pastry base) is actually Italian in origin, but became popular in France, to the point where some think the dish originated there. They're also quite popular in Japan and Hong Kong as well, due to chestnuts being a common seasonal dessert ingredient. If you want to have mont blanc in the states, you might actually have better luck finding it in an Asian bakery than a French or especially Italian one.
• Israeli Arabs love matzah, the cracker-like unleavened bread Jews eat on Passover, where most Israeli Jews only eat it during Passover. Really, many gentiles around the world enjoy the thing when exposed to it, whereas Jews just tend to find them bland and constipating. (Note that in all cases this refers specifically to the Ashkenazi style of hard flour-and-water matzah; the Mizrahi style often includes oil and even when it doesn't is much more pliable—it's basically a flour tortilla.)
• Though ice cream's exact origins remains a mystery, either Iran or China, ice cream is surprisingly popular in many countries, especially Japan, resulting in flavors found exclusively in that country, similar to KitKats. The whole world screams for ice cream.
• Hong Kong as an export/import hub between Asian and European countries ends up developing fondness for certain European products such as Ribena blackcurrent drink and Kjeldsen's butter cookies (this spread to Chinatown shops in North America from immigrants out of Hong Kong). To put this into context, the reason Campbell Soup acquired its owner Kelsen was "its strong brand awareness in China and Hong Kong", without much discussion on how they're doing in Europe.
  • Russians cannot get enough of Danish butter cookies as well, and they've became a stereotypical New Year and Christmas treat, with brightly painted tins overloading supermarkets every winter, but they prefer Royal Dansk brand, even if they're made by the same manufacturer as Kjeldsen.
  • Put it this way, as a meme shows, Danish cookies are popular in anywhere as long as it's not Western Europe.
  • Swanson's broth, another brand owned by Campbell Soup, has the same fate in Hong Kong as well. Hong Kongers just like using their chicken broth as a substitute for homemade stock, and to wit: Swanson's broth paste is sold as little packets that can make a cup of broth; over there the same thing is sold by the bottle as people use it to brine meat and enhance their stir-fried bok choi.
• Pringles potato chips are very popular in their native U.S., but are huge in Japan, with a whole line of Japan-exclusive flavors, just like KitKats.
  • Pringles also has a sizable following in Israel thanks to Procter & Gamble's expansion, to the point that every can distributed in the West has descriptions written in Hebrew.
• Chicken Maryland, the form of fried chicken native to Maryland (and specifically the Eastern Shore; while it has some purchase in other areas around Chesapeake Bay, it's practically unknown west of Greater Baltimore). In its original form, it is distinguished from the standard Southern version by being oven-fried and having a cream gravy made in the pan at the end. After its inclusion in Auguste Escoffier's 1934 cookbook Ma Cuisine, it became quite popular in continental Europe, Britain, Australia, and Latin America, but within the United States its popularity is more or less limited to Maryland.
  • Southern fried chicken is quite popular in places quite far from its home of origin: the dish was originally invented by the Scots, and then brought to the Southern U.S. when some immigrated there (some directly, others via Ireland), and then evolved further (particularly taking on some African influences). Since then, the dish has acquired substantial followings pretty much everywhere. It helps that chicken isn't restricted by religious dietary laws (other than ones that mandate some form of vegetarianism).
• Moon Pies, snacks consisting of marshmallow cream sandwiched between two cookies (traditionally Graham crackers) and covered in chocolate, are originally from the American South (Chattanooga, Tennessee, to be exact). In The '70s, an R&D man from a South Korean confectionery company visiting Atlanta on business became fascinated with the Moon Pies at the hotel^note Moon Pies being popular across the South generally, and in Atlanta particularly—their home of Chattanooga being only about 100 miles away, which is nothing in the U.S. and brought the idea back to Korea, where the company soon came out with the Choco Pie—a fairly successful offering, and an example of this trope on its own.
  
  However, where it really gets strange is that the treats became majorly popular in North Korea. Since 2004 South Korean companies can open factories in an industrial park in North Korea, but the North Korean government has the say on the salary of the workers, like any Stalinist state. However, the factories are at liberty to give out as much bonus as they feel like as long as they're not cash, and many employers give out Choco Pies, as much as 20 a day. Knowing the rest of North Korea has no such thing even close to it and nobody can even eat this much, some of the workers started smuggling them back to their home for their loved ones, and they became incredibly popular and became a valuable bartering item not unlike historical salt and silk.
  
  The government then limited the factories' Moon Pies giveouts (to a maximum of 5 a day) as they were becoming disruptive to its own economy (and because it demonstrated the North Koreans' terrible living conditions on a wide scale). Trolls from South Korea have since taken to floating packages of Moon Pies via balloons over the border because the government hates them but the people love them. Even the North Korean soldiers guarding the borders love Choco Pies; thanks in part to that, the government's hold on the populace via these guards have been weakening in recent years.
• Instant noodles was invented by a Japanese of Chinese origin in Japan, but was so ingrained into the Korean food culture that (1) they feel the need to defend for instant noodles in the same way they defend for kimchi, and (2) instant noodles was included in a series of video that the Korean embassy in China produced to promote Korean delicacy and their making, prompting the Chinese to wonder whether the Koreans were living in Perpetual Poverty.
  • Special mention to Doshirak, a South Korean instant noodle brand unique for its rectangular package, that instead very popular in Russia and become a part of Russian subculture.
  • On the topic of instant noodles, the brand Mamee in its home country of Malaysia persistently comes in third in surveys behind Cintan and Maggi (the latter even having become the Brand Name Takeover for instant noodles in the country). However, in France, Maggi is the instant noodle brand with all the other brands falling behind.
  • In the same vein, the Indonesian brand Indomie is synonymous with instant ramen in several Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East, e.g. Egypt, as well as West African countries like Nigeria and Ghana. In Nigeria specifically, the brand got so popular that Indofood, the company that produces it, built the largest noodle factory in Africa to cater with the astronomical demand.
  • Cup Noodle and Maruchan, two Japanese brands of instant ramen, are very popular in the United States. This is likely because of how cheap and convenient of a meal they are to eat for many people. These two brands of instant noodles are so popular in the country that there is merchandise themed after the food sold there, ranging from items such as blankets and plush toys to rather strange items using the license such as makeup. For the longest time, until fresh ramen became trendy, instant ramen was the only type that an American would have eaten.
• Saffron. Native to the Middle East, it is more or less required for traditional dishes of western countries, such as Italian risotto, French bouillabaisse, Spanish paella or Swedish saffron buns. It helps here that while the saffron crocus is somewhat fussy about its growing conditions, microclimates exist across Europe that allow substantial if limited local production in most of the continent—the flowers are grown in parts of Austria, Germany, England,^note Which is how Saffron Walden in Essex got its name—it was an old center for saffron production both for food and for dyes. and Sweden, though these pale in comparison to the more traditional regions of Spain, Italy, Greece, and Iran. (The great expense of saffron has less to do with the difficulty of growing the crop and more to do with the fact that the spice has to be collected delicately, by hand, flower by flower.)
• Japanese people seem to love junk food even more than Americans do. Doritos, Cheetos and Oreos are more popular in Japan than their native US. Oreos are also very popular in China.
• Fried eggs and other egg meals are more popular in Japan and China:
  • Bacon and eggs are a popular "Western" breakfast during the work week in Japan, as it's easier to prepare than a traditional Japanese breakfast. In the meantime, a Westerner marvels at the idea of eating bacon and eggs during the work week, generally preferring the quicker "continental" breakfast of cereal (cold or hot—but only the latter if you have a microwave and quick-cooking hot cereal, or a ready source of hot water and instant hot cereal) or bread with some coffee or tea; if bacon and eggs are going to be eaten outside the weekend, it will be in the form of a frozen or fast food breakfast sandwich and hardly deserve the title. This is because married women are still largely expected to become housewives in Japan. A large breakfast every day is a lot easier to pull off during the work week when only one half of a couple works.
  • Tamagoyaki (omelettes) are also a bento box staple. Omurice is a popular "Japanized" Western dish which is an omelette filled with fried rice, chicken and ketchup.
  • Where eggs get into Foreign Queasine territory is Japan's love of raw eggs in dishes, doubly so for the traditional breakfast of natto over rice with raw egg mixed in. Egg cartons are marked with a date where it's safe to eat eggs raw. Eggs in Japan are sterilized to reduce the risk of food-borne diseases.
• The standard Friday dinner in Norway and Sweden is tacos. Nobody knows why; neither country has a significant Mexican diaspora (Chileans are the only significant Latin American minority), and Mexican cuisine or culture has had no major impact otherwise. Still, almost every Norwegian and Swedish food store will have a section entirely dedicated to tacos.
• Norwegian and Swedish people tend to have béarnaise sauce with everything, including pizza.
• Tamari, a kind of Japanese soy sauce that is made solely of soy beans (historically being a byproduct of fermenting soybeans into miso), is considered only as a local style in Japan; the rest of the country use soy sauce brewed with a mixture of soy and wheat. However, the influence of the Macrobiotic diet^note which prefers legumes to wheat, among others in the West during 1960s-1970s makes it as important as traditional soy sauce in the Western world, with San-J's tamari as well-known as Kikkoman's soy sauce in American supermarkets.
• American peanut butter brand Skippy usually plays second fiddle to Jif when it comes to sales in its home country, but it is the most popular peanut butter brand in China.
• Lucky Charms cereal is a cult favorite in the United Kingdom. General Mills does not manufacture or sell the cereal to people in the UK, so they have to be imported by third-party companies or bought from the United States and shipped across the Atlantic. In addition, no domestic cereal producer makes cereal with marshmallows in the style of Lucky Charms. As a result, people in the UK will pay high prices for the stuff, usually at least three times the price that they'd be sold in the US. A few British supermarkets now have an American foods section that will invariably contain Lucky Charms, and they will always be the most expensive item in that section.
• Quick, which country consumes the most turkey per capita? Could it be Mexico, where the bird was domesticated (and where turkey with mole is considered a national dish)? Or perhaps America, where the bird is native and there are common uses for it at every meal?^note Think about it: is there anything at all unusual about an American having turkey sausage for breakfast, a turkey sandwich for lunch, and roast turkey for dinner? Especially if it's after Thanksgiving and you have five pounds of turkey leftovers from the feast... Nope, it's Israel. Almost all meat has to be imported there, and fresh meat is very difficult to export, so there's reliance on cured meats. Beef is expensive, chicken is too delicate, and obviously the Jewish and Muslim populace won't be interested in pork, so turkey is the main meat of choice in Israel.
  • Another surprising major consumer of turkey is Morocco. It's not uncommon in certain regions (e.g. the Middle Atlas) for local sandwich shops to have turkey on the menu but not chicken. What makes this particularly unexpected is that the turkey is fresh—the sandwich shops (to use that example) will grill cubes of marinated fresh turkey breast with tomatoes, onions, etc., to stuff into a roll with whatever toppings the customer likes (green olives and harissa—a Moroccanized Tunisian hot sauce—are particularly popular). They will have these options with sausage and kofta (ground meat patty, usually lamb/mutton in Morocco) as well as turkey, but chicken? Hardly ever.
• Sriracha sauce has this on two levels. It's a hot sauce originating in Thailand that became popular in Vietnam. It was introduced to the U.S. by a refugee from The Vietnam War in the early 1980s. The version produced by Huy Fong Foods, with the eye-catching design with the green top, optional rooster (and tongue-burning flavor) became very popular on the West Coast and the rest of the U.S. The term "sriracha" itself was never trademarked, and restaurants have introduced their own sriracha-flavored dishes.
• Curry began in India, referring to a dish cooked with a complex mix of spices, usually (but not necessarily) including some kind of protein (be it meat, seafood, legumes, or cheese) and usually (but not necessarily) involving a rich sauce, served with rice or bread. The dish did not spread beyond the Subcontinent and environs (e.g. Thailand) until the British got hold of it, but when they did, they went crazy for it (like all other Indian dishes) and spread it around the world.
  • The Japanese famously invented their karē in imitation of British curry, suitably modified to satisfy Japanese tastes. Because it is modeled on British curry, it is considered yōshoku ("Easternized" Western cuisine) and eaten off plates with forks and spoons (not that the traditional Indian way of eating curry—with bare hands, possibly using bread or a ball of rice as a utensil—is any less alien to Japan).
    • In an interesting case of Recursive Import, Japanese-style curry became trendy in the United Kingdom around The New '10s, especially katsu curry, or curry served with a fried meat cutlet. It got to the point where the term "katsu curry" became a catch-all term for any Japanese curry in the country.
  • The Koreans got curry from the Japanese occupation, and so Korean curry is similar to the Japanese, though Korean curry tends to have a much more yellow-ish tint. The common South Korean military curry eaten by the conscripts is very watery to a point that it becomes one of the most hated foods in South Korea.
  • China got curry from the British-mediated trade with India, with Japanese influence via trade and occupation; Chinese curries are thus similar to British and Japanese ones.
    • A peculiar example of Chinese curry is Hong Kong-style curry, which seems to have started with a British-style base, but incorporates Chinese seasonings (like licorice root, star anise, and powdered dried citrus peel) and cooking techniques (the way HK-style curry paste is made^note Grind your spices to a powder, heat some neutral oil to almost smoking, let the oil cool slightly, add the ground spices, let the oil cool completely, bottle the resultant paste more closely resembles the method for Chinese chili oils^note Which typically involve either adding hot oil to powdered chilis/spices (like Sichuan hongyou and most recipes for Sichuan youlazi) or adding powdered chilis to hot oil (most prominently Guizhou youlajiao—of which the noted Lao Gan Ma is a famous brand—and some varieties of youlazi) than the Indian or Southeast Asian curry pastes^note In which whole spices are typically pounded with aromatics like garlic, onion, fresh ginger or galangal, lemongrass, and other ingredients), and developed Southeast Asian influences (it's typically flavored with lemongrass and finished with coconut cream). This version is common in chachaantengs (the diner-style Canto-Western fusion restaurants mentioned elsewhere on this page) but is also used for HK-style curry fishballs, a noted street snack in the city.
  • The British took actual Indians to both the Pacific and West Indies to work on their plantations as indentured labourers; they brought their Indian cooking to these islands, where it mixed with the natives' cuisines (in the Pacific) and the cuisines of the African-descended former slaves (in the West Indies) to create new forms of curry (and other dishes). West Indian curry goat, featuring allspice (native to the Caribbean) and Caribbean chili peppers like the Scotch Bonnet in the spice mix, served with rice or roti, is a particularly famous dish demonstrating this fusion.
  • In the late 20th century, the growing diaspora of Indians and others from the Subcontinent brought Indian curries to new countries, including the US and Canada (where they are very popular). Since many of these immigrants came first through Britain, the curries sold at Indian restaurants in these countries often have a British flavour.
  • Currywurst was likely invented in Berlin during the early occupation period before the erection of the Berlin Wall; moreover given both the key ingredient (curry powder) and the subsequent history of the dish (popuar in West Berlin and West Germany, not so much in the East), it probably arose in one of the Western occupation sectors, and most likely the British one. The most common story is thus that the owner of a food kiosk in Berlin received some curry powder and other ingredients from a British occupation soldier in the late 1940s, and she applied these to a traditional German pork sausage to make a new snack/lunch for the capital's workers. It's still quite popular in the capital, but has also captured the stomach of the Ruhr area, Germany's erstwhile industrial heart and economic engine, so much so that some there try to find "proof" that it was actually invented there and not in Berlin. From the Ruhr, the dish became popular with blue-collar workers across Germany (well, West Germany at first). This has led to Volkswagen actually producing their own Currywurst for their plant in Wolfsburg, which has neither a connection to Berlin nor to the Ruhr area (it's in Lower Saxony, maybe about halfway between the two). They also (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) assigned it a VW part number (199 398 500 A) and call it a "Volkswagen Original Part" (as though it were one of their OEM head gaskets or something). VW currywurst is now sold in supermarkets throughout Germany, and the company's European dealers regularly give packages of the stuff to buyers of new cars.
• Avocados:
  • While avocados are very well loved in their native Mexico, they're also incredibly popular in Chile. "Pan con palta" (crust bread with mashed avocado - "palta" being the local name fo avocados) is a staple part of Chilean breakfast, the local version of Caesar Salad adds avocado slices to the recipe, and many foreign fast food chains add avocado sauce when they settle in Chile. This is an interesting Double Subversion: Avocados were known in South America before the Spaniards arrived, having come to Peru through the small-but-significant pre-Columbian trade routes between Mesoamerica and the Andes (the same trade gave South America maize).^note It might have also given Mesoamerica tomatoes and potatoes, but the evidence isn't as clear. On the potato front, it's just not clear how far north potatoes made it from their Andean homeland before the Spanish Conquest. As for tomatoes, the historical records are at odds with the biological ones. On one hand, archaeological finds and early Maya and Aztec records—as well as the accounts of the Conquistadores from when they showed up in the 16th century—clearly tell us tomatoes were known there before the Spanish Conquest, while there's not much clear evidence of tomatoes in pre-Columbian South America. However, botany is just as clear that the closest wild relatives of the domestic tomato are indigenous to western South America and are not found in Mesoamerica. The word palta comes from the Andean Quechua language. All this being said, it applies to Peru—Chile didn't have avocados until they were brought down from Peru during the colonial period.
  • Avocados are also a quintessential part of California cuisine, but then again California was a part of Mexico until the 1840s.
    • General dishes that named as a California style, for example California omelets or California salads, typically include avocado.
• Chicken originated in Asia and did not reach the Americas before Columbus, yet they are so popular in Central America that the local word for "meat" deliberately excludes them. (Don't like meat? How about chicken?) Greasy fried chicken is the fast food meal of choice and nearly all domestic fast food chains are almost entirely or completely based around that.
• Pierogi originated in Poland and Ukraine and remain very much a part of Eastern European cuisine, but these filled dumplings are also popular in Canada and the US, particularly around the Philadelphia area and even more so in Pittsburgh. This is due in part to the large Eastern European immigration to North America.
• Modern potato chips/crisps are believed to have originated in the U.S., but are also popular around the world. As with pizza and sushi, different countries have put their own regional stamp on potato chips with country-specific flavorings.
• Potato scones, aka tattie scones, are a localised version of farls, which were brought to Scotland by Irish immigrants. They are a such a typical part of Scottish cuisine that they are more associated with it than with Irish cuisine, and Scots who've moved elsewhere will often be homesick for them.
• Apples are grown and eaten worldwide, with many countries developing popular varieties of their own (the Australian Granny Smith, the Canadian McIntosh, the Japanese Fuji, the New Zealand Gala…). In particular, they've become associated with American culture, since the US has a fair bit of apple history (e.g. Johnny Appleseed) and apple pie is a national dish of the country. Where did this much-loved fruit first come from? Central Asia.
• Allspice is the berry of a small tree native to the Greater Antilles, particularly Jamaica. While it is probably most popular in its native land (there is basically nothing a Jamaican won't put allspice on), it has become an indispensable part of cooking the world over. Particularly dependent on it are cooks in much of the Arab world, and especially in the Levant, where some dishes call for no seasoning other than salt and allspice. (Want to make your chicken dish taste more Lebanese? Simple! Just add lemon juice, garlic, and allspice, and your taste buds will be flying to Beirut!)
• Hainanese chicken rice, which originated from the island province of Hainan off the southern coast of China, is classified as a national dish of Singapore. It's also widely consumed in Malaysia and Thailand.
• The chewy fruit flavored candy Hi-Chew is currently the only Japanese candy to see mainstream success in the United States outside of the Asian-American and otaku demographics. It's the only one to be widely distributed in just about any store that sells candy rather than relegated to Asian grocers, the international aisle or the anime section of a video store like other iconic Japanese snacks like Pocky are. There are even TV commercials!
• The cream-filled Panda-shaped cookies Hello Panda are no longer even sold in its home country of Japan, but is one of the few Japanese snacks one can find in just about any American grocery store.
• Tempura, lightly battered deep-fried fish/meat/vegetables, so popular in Japan that it's generally considered part of its native cuisine. However, it originated from Portuguese missionaries when they visited Japan during the 16th and 17th centuries. It is based on pexinhos da horta, literally "little fish of the garden", a dish consisting of vegetables battered and fried to resemble small fried fish (battered fried fish being a very classic preparation in Portugal and Spain—as mentioned elsewhere, Iberian fried fish is ancestral to British fish and chips). It was meant to be served during the time of Lent, where Catholics were forbidden to eat meat. In Latin, the Portuguese called this religious devotion ad tempora cuaresme which means "in the time of Lent"; the Japanese mistook that to be the dish's name, and that led to the name "tempura". It was a very popular food as it's reported that this was the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu's favorite food.
• The Japanese also latched onto paella, such that while it might be hard to find in most countries outside of its native Spain, everyone in Japan knows what it is and there are many paella joints, especially in large cities. Of course, paella is a dish made primarily of seafood and rice, two staples of traditional Japanese cuisine.
• It is debatable how much this trope applies between the United States and English-speaking Canada due to there already being so much cultural crossover between the two countries, but the Canadian frozen food company Maxi, under the brand name Yummy, had struck gold in the US with its Dino Buddies, chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs, which are higher-quality than one might expect for dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and keep their flavor incredibly well when microwaved. Also qualifies as Periphery Demographic, as the packaging makes it clear Yummy aimed Dino Buddies at kids but it found its American niche with college students instead due to their convenience both in cooking and in eating.
• Saltwater taffy, a soft, chewy American candy made with saltwater (usually a mixture of freshwater and salt, not actual seawater), was originally invented in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and is still considered something of a specialty associated with the resort town’s famous Boardwalk (and to a lesser extent other American seaside resorts with boardwalks, particularly on the Jersey Shore). It is however extraordinarily popular in Japan, probably because its sweet and salty flavor is appealing to the Japanese palate.
• Ovomaltine (known in the U.S. as Ovaltine) is very popular in Brazil, due to both a fortunate manufacturing defect that made the local recipe crispy◊, and usage in ice creams and milkshakes by local fast food joints.
• Onion rings, a fried food invented in the United States, are very popular in Australia—but specifically in the style served at Burger King, known there as Hungry Jack's. This particular style is smaller than a normal onion ring and has mashed onions inside rather than the continuous strip of onion that is otherwise the standard. Onion rings as traditionally prepared in the US, however, are practically unheard of in Australia; any Australian onion rings that aren't from Hungry Jack's are extremely likely to be inspired by the chain's style.
• Similarly, Kansas City style barbecue sauce, the kind Americans commonly refer to simply as "barbecue sauce," is very popular in Australia as well, so much that it is often referred to simply as "sauce." In other words, if an Australian restaurant has it and you request for just "sauce," they'll assume you mean Kansas City style barbecue sauce.
• Chicken Parmigana is named after Parma, Italy, and derives from the Eggplant Parmigiana indigenous to Naples. (What connection, if any, the Neapolitan dish has to the actual city of Parma is unclear.) However, it is ubiquitous in Australia, to the point that you can order it at the counter in any pub. There is even a national debate over whether it should be called "parma" or "parmi" for short. And in the United States, Italian Americans have made more or less the same dish under the name "Chicken Parm" for generations and have made it a staple of old-school Italian-American "red gravy" restaurants and East Coast diners. These Italian-Americans have also (per American tradition) stuffed this dish, its eggplant ancestor, and its veal and meatball cousins into sandwich rolls, as lovingly explicated by Andrew Rea (himself of partial Italian ancestry).
• Turbo is a chewing gum produced by the Turkish company Kent Gıda. However, it was massively successful in Poland and other parts of eastern Europe during the 1990s, with its inserts, featuring pictures of various vehicles, being a collectable fad.
• Kellogg's were founded in the United States (in Battle Creek, Michigan to be exact), yet one of its biggest markets is in the United Kingdom, home to many UK-exclusive Kellogg's brands such as Coco Pops. Corn Flakes in particular is a breakfast staple among Brits, and the company even holds a Royal Warrant.
• The Mexican rolled corn tortilla chip snack Takis is one of the few Latin American snack food brands to see mainstream success in the United States outside of the Latino/Hispanic and Mexican-American demographics. It's the only one to be widely distributed in just about any store that sells snack foods rather than being relegated to Hispanic grocers or the international aisle like other Latin American snack food brands are. It's also picked up a loyal customer base within the Gen Z demographic.
• The Vietnamese took the French baguette, added local ingredients as fillings, and created the banh mi. The banh mi then gained popularity in the United States and Australia via Vietnamese immigrants.
• Nachos were invented in the Mexican state of Coahuila by Mexican chef Ignacio Anaya Garcia, who's also their namesake ("Nacho" is short for "Ignacio"). Although Anaya's original recipe Nacho Especiale ("Nacho's Special") uses traditional Mexican ingredients (i.e. tortilla chips,^note Which are traditional, deep-frying being one of the accepted ways to turn corn tortillas into totopos, which are used in many traditional dishes across Mexico. They're also almost the same as the even more traditional tostadas, differing only in shape (totopos/tortilla chips are made from round tortillas cut into quarters; tostadas are whole round tortillas deep-fried until crisp). shredded cheese, and jalapeno), nachos went on to become vastly more popular as a snack food in the United States than they ever were in Mexico, and they're generally classified as an example of Mexican-American culinary fusion.
• People often joke about Britain's supposedly inedible cuisine, but the "full English breakfast" is coveted the world over, and the basis for similar large breakfasts consisting of fried food in North America.
• Spin a globe and point and you'll likely land on a country whose local cuisine loves and heavily incorporates garlic. From its origins in Southern Asia, this humble little bulb's perfect combination of easy to grow, flavorful and tasty, and containing possible health benefits have led it to proliferate pretty much everywhere, with multiple Asian, Latin American, and European dishes (it's a staple in the sauce of the aforementioned wildly-popular pizza,) all heavily featuring it. Its cousins in the allium family of plants... leeks, scallions, and especially onions... are also popular. Sauteeing onions and garlic is the backbone and first step of countless recipes the world over.

Beverages

• Coffee is yet another one of those things that's popular everywhere, though its origins are usually traced to Ethiopia. Espresso coffee, originating in Italy, has also pretty much conquered the world. The whole world Must Have Caffeine.
  • Instant coffee is more popular in Europe than in the United States, where it was developed. Americans, used to fresh-brewed coffee, think of instant the same way most people regard condensed milk: better for cooking with than for actually drinking. People in the U.S. needing a quick caffeine fix typically turn to Starbucks, pod machines and energy drinks instead of a jar of instant. The only domestic market where instant coffee has really taken off is in the Hispanic community.
  • Nescafé was invented by Swiss multinational company Nestlé as part of an initiative of the Brazilian government that aimed to preserve the substantial surplus of the annual Brazilian coffee harvest, and became hugely popular in the US during the World War II era, but it tends to be more popular with older demographics in modern times. However, in Israel it is so popular that all instant coffee is colloquially called "Nescafe", or "Nes" for short, and it will be provided in every hotel and restaurant you go to.
  • Currently, 77% of coffee consumed in the UK at home is instant. This probably is due to the tea culture dominating, meaning that everyone has a kettle (which can be used to make instant coffee) and relatively few own coffee makers. This percentage is falling as more people are exposed to the cheaper coffee makers and the growth of continental-style espresso-based coffeehouse culture, or rather its reintroduction to Britain after its initial popularity in The '50s and The '60s. As in Japan and Russia, coffee was more often viewed as a quick source of caffeine rather than as a beverage in itself when Brits didn't have time for a nice cup of tea before high-quality coffee started showing up. Kitchens are also smaller in Britain—and the rest of Europe, for that matter—with less room for American-style drip machines.
  • In Soviet times coffee imports were at times pretty unstable in Russia, especially in The '80s, so the food industry had to make do with various substitutes (like burnt barley or dark malts and chicory), sometimes going as low as using them to stretch the dwindling supplies of the ground coffee without telling that on the package. This has lead to the peaking popularity of instant coffee in the Soviet Union — as most of the stuff was imported in the sealed tins, it was virtually impossible to put in adulterants without breaking the package. Home grinding also became all the rage for the same reason, unlike the times of the more stable supply, when most coffee drinkers preferred the convenience of the pre-ground stuff. That said, Russia doesn't really go for coffee that much, except at the two extremes: expensive, sophisticated coffee limited to aficionados and hipsters, and instant or otherwise quickly prepared coffin varnish for working class people and others who need a bigger caffeine jolt in the morning than the traditional Russian tea can give them.
  • The inventor of instant coffee,^note Well, one of several; contemporary freeze-dried instant coffee was independently invented several times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries Satori Kato, was Japanese (though living in the United States at the time). Naturally, Japan is essentially a tea culture; coffee is far less of a mainstay than it is in the U.S. and other coffee cultures. Much as in Russia, coffee is mostly used as a quick, concentrated source of caffeine. That said, to the extent that the Japanese do drink coffee at home, it is usually instant coffee, and for the same reason as in Britain—in a country where everybody has a relatively small kitchen and has an electric kettle for making tea, instant coffee starts to make a lot of sense. On the other hand, (again much like in Russia), there is a small class of Japanese coffee connoisseurs who take the drink very seriously. These guys (like the Russians) will have nothing to do with instant, and their obsessive commitment to quality in both bean and technique have strongly influenced non-Japanese "Third Wave" coffee (the use of the labor-intensive pourover technique was revived in Japan after being invented by Mellita Bentz in Germany and eventually overtaken by automatic drip coffee makers).
  • You would expect that South Korea would be a tea culture like its East Asian neighbors, given its proximity to both Japan and China. While it is true that Korea is traditionally tea territory with minor surviving tea-drinking traditions, and traditional tea preparation recently holds a high position in Korean culture starting from the 21st century, modern South Korea is coffee crazy. Like its neighbors, most of the coffee in South Korea at home or in greasy spoon restaurants is instant, though they have been quite creative with the stuff (the dalgona whipped coffee that everyone seemed to be making in the early days of the 2020 pandemic lockdowns was a South Korean invention; the name refers to the visual resemblance of the whipped instant coffee foam to the South Korean honeycomb toffee treat dalgona). South Korea also has a vibrant cafe scene for serious coffee lovers based on similar techniques as elsewhere (that is to say, every way but instant).
    • The Dalgona coffee is this for one further reason—the original dalgona coffee was from, of all places, Macau.
    • South Koreans often cite King Gojong, the first modern Korean monarch, as Korea's first coffee mania.
    • Americano is the national drink of South Korea in all practical sense.
    • The world's first plastic stick coffee mix was invented in 1976 by the South Korean company, Dongseo Foods.
  • Drip coffee was also invented in Germany by Melitta Bentz and is naturally the dominant coffee-making method in North America.
  • The world's most keen coffee drinkers are the Scandinavians, despite the Nordic countries being far from Ethiopia. Coffee means the world to them to the point that most will have a very hard time (or be literally unable to) getting through the day without a cup of coffee in the morning and preferably several more during the day. If you don't drink coffee, you are either considered rather immature (because children tend to not like the taste) or really weird, and even if you would never drink coffee yourself, you have to buy it anyway as people are required by unwritten rules to offer coffee to any guests they have. Such is the Nordic obsession with coffee that (1) they literally invented the coffee break as a labor concept and (2) they have successfully sold their roasts internationally (Gevalia, the historical aristocratic Swedish roastery, sells its wares globally).
  • Before the fall of the Wall, people in East Germany were so desperate for coffee that the Eastern economic organisation (Comecon) decided to start growing coffee in a big way in Vietnam. As a result, Vietnam is one of the world's largest exporters of coffee to this day.
  • In modern Russia, cheap instant coffee (such as Nescafé Gold and Maxim, the Korean brand) has inexplicably became the drink of choice for the farmers in the Far East, in contrast to the usual Russian love of tea. Be it in the field, on the pasture, at the elevator or stockyard, or in the marketplace —everywhere you'll be met with the characteristic burnt rubber smell.
    • The Maxim brand alone is another example. It was introduced by General Foods of the US—of Maxwell House fame—in the 1960s as the first freeze-dried coffee in the world. But these days the only companies that make this brand of coffee are General Foods' (now Kraft Heinz) East Asian partners—AGF^note Ajinomoto-General Foods of Japan, and Dong Suh^note East-West Food in South Korea. In both places, Maxwell House itself was driven out of the market.
  • Even though instant coffee is popular in Britain as mentioned above, when Brits do have coffeemakers, they tend to go for the cafetiere or French press. This is likely due to the same reason that instant coffee is popular there: the U.K. is still mainly a tea culture, and kettles are more common than coffeemakers. The fast-boiling electric kettles popular there are ideal for making fresh coffee in a press. The process of using a French press is also very similar to making tea in a teapot. Plus, kitchens are smaller and there's less room for an American-style drip brewer. French presses are typically quite compact.
  • The Japanese Hario series of pour-over manual drip coffeemakers have become must-haves for Western baristas and other coffee aficionados. Japan also seems to prefer pour-over coffeemakers for fresh coffee for the same reason that Brits go for French presses: they're easier to use with the electric kettles and hot water boilers that are ubiquitous in Japanese kitchens thanks to Japan being a tea culture.
  • The vacuum brewer was once the mainstay of diners across the US, but was all but disappeared in The '60s. It is, however, still ubiquitous in Japanese cafes, and thus having some renaissance in the West—this time under the Japanese name, siphon coffee.
  • In Italy and the rest of continental Europe, the cappuccino is typically only consumed at breakfast; there's a sort of unspoken consensus that it's slightly gauche to put milk in your coffee after noon. In the English-speaking world, lacking the continental taboo of "no milk in your coffee past noon", people at Starbucks and other places order cappuccinos and lattes all day. Americans also prefer to relax with their coffee the same way Brits Love Tea, hence the preference for longer drinks such as cappuccino and drip coffee, contrasted with Italians who prefer to grab espresso shots while standing at the bar. This is likely due to the cooler climates of Northern Europe and the Pacific Northwest, where Starbucks is headquartered, making hot milky beverages more appealing later in the day than in the warm Mediterranean climate of Italy. The cappuccino itself is an Austrian invention dating to the 19th century from Vienna's famous coffeehouses, where it was originally known as the kapuzinzer, named after the color of the Capuchin monks' robes. It was originally made with regular brewed coffee, milk and whipped cream. The espresso-based version first appeared in the 1930s.
  • Over 80% of Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee, one of the most expensive coffees in the world, is exported to Japan.
  • One of the countries where Starbucks failed to expand was in Australia, because the country already had its own espresso-based cafe culture dating back to the 1950s, which ended up being exported to the U.S.
• Fosters is a brand of Australian lager that has declined in recent decades in its home country (Aussies sometimes claim that "Fosters is Australian for piss"), but it is popular in the UK, and enjoyed a bump in American sales in the 1990s (due primarily to a series of memetic commercials that affectionately parodied American perceptions of Australian stereotypes).
• In Mexico, Corona is basically the local Budweiser, a cheap beer that doesn't really taste good; if you want to look "cool", you're better off with a Bohemia, a Negra Modelo or a Minerva (and ironically Corona and Modelo are brewed by the same company). But the moment you go to an anglophone country, if you want to look "cool", you order a Corona (though this has attenuated since the mid-2010s in the U.S., where people who know beer tend to go for Negra Modelo for a flavorful Mexican beer, Dos Equis Amber for an inoffensive one, and Tecate for a cheap one that tastes OK when you drop in a lime wedge).
• Clamato. It's a mixture of tomato and clam juice originally produced by the Mott's company in the United States. In the US, if you were to bring it up to most people you'd either get a confused look or a look of revulsion. However, it has proven to be more popular on the other sides of the borders — in Canada, it's the mixer of choice for the Caesar, a Bloody Mary variant that is the country's de facto national cocktail, and in Mexico, it is mixed with beer, lime, and ice to form a michelada cocktail, and it's popular enough among Mexican-American communities in Clamato's home country of the US to the point where beer giant Anheuser-Busch nationally markets a premixed Budweiser/Clamato beverage.
• The top-selling lager in the UK is Stella Artois, a Belgian beer. It is not very popular in its home country (it's a pilsner in a country renowned for its ales; the other pale lager beers in Belgium, despite racking up a majority of beer sales, are similarly not-so-popular). Stella Artois is also very popular in the US as one of the country's top-selling import beers from Europe. Belgian beer in general is better regarded by foreigners than by Belgians themselves, mainly because many Belgians do not buy that much beer at all.
• Belgians love bottled mineral water. There is even a few Belgian brands of mineral water (Spa and Chaudfontaine, for instance) that are near-impossible to find outside of Europe or Belgium itself.
• Belgians love carbon soda, a British invention. It is often seen as a more tasty alternative to mineral water, which together with mineral water, makes it one of the best-selling beverages in Belgium.
• Bock is a kind of strong lager, of German origin, normally drunk in special occasions like Christmas, Easter or Lent in the majority of the countries it's produced. But not in Portugal: one of our most popular brands of beer is Super Bock, especially north of the river Mondego, but also increasingly south of it.
  • A Bock is also one of the most popular brands of beer in Texas, where Shiner Bock is the drink of choice for everyone proud to call the Lone Star State home.
• In a more general sense, hopped beer. Originated in Germany, and has since literally spread around the entire world, even the Muslim world. ^note (Contrary to popular belief, in most Muslim countries alcohol is legal and in some countries such as Turkey and Lebanon the Muslims have relatively loose attitudes towards alcohol. In those countries, the beer of choice is a hopped pale lager and the local brands are of that type. In the countries that do ban alcohol, non-alcoholic hopped beers are very popular.) There's a reason that English, the language of a people with centuries of brewing tradition and vocabulary behind them, uses a German loanword to describe any malt beverage, and use the native term (ale) for a subcategory of it.
• Scotch whisky is very big business in India and Japan, to the point where local distilleries in both countries attempt to market their own malt whiskies, often with Scottish imagery such as tartan on the label.
  • Japanese, being masters of Serious Business after all, have been quite able to make Scotch on par with Scotland; it helps that there are parts of Japan with a somewhat similar climate to Scotland. The Indians, having a poorer market and a different climate profile, have mostly turned to passing off barrel-aged rum as Scotch.
  • Similarly, Venezuela loves it some Scotch. Even if the country makes some of the best rum in the Caribbean, whisky was first a luxury good, but now it's very popular, especially for Christmas and New Year parties.
  • And now, Diageo—makers of Johnnie Walker Scotch—are actively trying to invoke this in developing countries with large new middle classes.
  • One of the largest consumers of whisky are the French, likely due to the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France. (As mentioned elsewhere, Scotland—and Britain generally—returns the favour by drinking a great deal of French wine and brandy.)
• Buckfast Tonic Wine, a British beverage that is a cross between wine and an energy drink, is brewed in Devon in the south-west of England, but is somewhat obscure in England. However, it is so popular in Scotland - particularly Glasgow and surrounding towns - that it is the drink most associated with neds.
• Four Roses Kentucky bourbon. It's one of the top brands in Europe and Asia. It wasn't even sold in the US for a fifty-year period.
• Inversely, back in the 18th century, Catherine the Great, trying to wean her troops off vodka,^note Though note that vodka in Catherinian times was wholly unlike the modern one, and was essentially an unaged rye whisky. had the military order beer from English brewers, who responded by inventing a new style of dark, malty stout with a high alcohol content (8-9% abv) to suit Russian tastes and preserve it for the long trip across the North Sea and the Baltic. The Russians didn't really go for it that much—not that they disliked it, but it didn't really replace vodka—but the style has proven extremely popular in the United States, where craft breweries usually market their high-gravity dark ales as "Russian Imperial Stout".
  • Another bunch who liked the new English beer for Russians more than the English or the Russians are the peoples of the Baltic, who at first in imitation began making "Baltic porter"—a dark lager that still manages to be remarkably stout-like.
• Guinness stout, while popular enough in its native Ireland and Europe, is practically considered by Nigerians to be their national beer. This seems to be largely due to opening its first non-Irish brewery in Lagos in 1962 and the label slightly adjusting the formula to incorporate African grains such as sorghum^note Guinness would actually export a "flavor extract" made of malted barley, which would be added to domestically produced beer. The amount of success Guinness has had in Nigeria is so great, one could find Nigerian-brewed versions being sold in British and Irish supermarkets, and Guinness globally markets a "Foreign Extra Stout" based on the recipes it exported to non-European countries.
• A number of French wines, although popular in present-day France, owe their entire existence to the British export market; Bordeaux wine was originally made for export in English-held areas of southwestern France (which had passed to English control when Henry the Second married Eleanor Of Aquitaine in 1152). This is where we get the term "claret" for a certain type of red Bordeaux: clairet was a type of darkish transparent rosé from Bordeaux the English liked and bought in vast quantities in the Middle Ages. Eventually tastes changed to red wine, but the name of the wine remained the same.^note For the curious, you can still get good clear dark-rosé clairet from Bordeaux, but it's more of a specialty wine today. Even after England lost those regions, the nobles saw no reason to change their well-established habits and kept buying French wine—when they could.
  • When the English (and later British) nobs couldn't get their hands on French wine (usually because of their respective countries' rather longstanding habit of going to war), they sourced their wines from elsewhere, particularly Spain and Portugal.
    • On the Spain front: This is how sherry became a national tradition in the British upper crust (and later trickled down to the middle classes). For reasons of complicated European politics, England/Britain was usually at peace with Spain whenever it was at war with France, and vice-versa (except during the middle decades of the 18th century, when the Bourbon Family Compact instituted after the War of the Spanish Succession was in effect).
    • As for Portugal, its wines benefited even more from Anglo-French animosity. Portuguese wine was nearly always available in Britain because of the centuries-long alliance between England/Britain and Portugal. Port wine in particular became an obsession, wrapped in all kind of aristocratic tradition. Sending port to Britain became such big business in the 18th century (during the period of Franco-Spanish alliance under the aforementioned Family Compact) that the majority of port merchants in Portugal have British names to this day. At the same time, the wines of Madeira—a Portuguese possession—also gained popularity in Britain for similar reasons. Madeira also became popular among the upper crust of the Thirteen Colonies, as Madeira's location in the mid-Atlantic made it a regular port of call for transatlantic voyages. (According to legend, the Continental Congress toasted the passage of the U.S. Declaration of Independence with Madeira wine.) It also had a lasting impact on economics: David Ricardo (a Brit of Portuguese Jewish descent) used English cloth and Portuguese wine to demonstrate his theory of comparative advantage—an example still used in economics classes today.
  • British brokers are also responsible for the popularity of sparkling Champagne. The traditional still white wines of Champagne developed a following in England in the 17th century; many of these wines would come out sparkling by accident. Nobody back then actually tried to make sparkling wine, as at the time, the carbonation was usually considered a wine fault. And no wonder: if you shook the bottle wrong, it could explode! However, the English loved the fizzy wine when it didn't explode in their servants' faces, and looked for ways to make it safer to consume. As luck would have it, English glassmakers had developed new glassmaking techniques at that time that allowed them to make sturdier bottles that could handle the pressure (using some new technologies that would later be translated to the metallurgy that made the steam engine and Industrial Revolution possible, but now we're getting ahead of ourselves). The new bottles were adopted quickly, and the French soon made a fortune out of selling sparkling Champagne first to the English/British, and then to everyone else (including themselves).
  • The same is true of Sauternes, the great botrytised (i.e., affected by noble rot) sweet white wine of Bordeaux. This wine was originally created in response to 17th-century Dutch demand for a French wine similar to the Hungarian Tokaji: the Dutch loved Central European sweet whites (like Tokaji, but also German ones like Riesling), but these were increasingly inaccessible for a variety of reasons.^note The main thing seems to have been changing preferences in Central Europe that led to wine being replaced with beer. Also, given bad blood between the Netherlands and the Habsburgs who ruled most of Central Europe, the Habsburgs—who directly ruled Hungary and either controlled or strongly influenced the Rhine wine regions that made Riesling—weren't exactly enthusiastic to sell to the Dutch. Moreover, in the following century, the English wine merchants who dominated the Bordeaux export market noted this new sweet wine and successfully marketed it in Britain (and America; both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson loved Sauternes) as a dessert wine serving roughly the same role as a port, Madeira, or sweet sherry. That said, the French have since acquired a taste for it, particularly when paired with foie gras.
• Around 1950, kosher wine suddenly became very popular among non-Jewish minorities in the United States, particularly African Americans. A lot of black people were moving into Northern cities at this time, often settling around Jewish neighborhoods, and the very sweet taste of brands like Manischewitz proved reminiscent to drinks popular in the South. At one point 85% of Manischewitz's advertising budget was going to Ebony magazine alone, and even today its primary consumers tend to be black and Hispanic rather than Jewish. It also has strong markets in Jamaica and Asia.
• The Irish (or Europeans in general?) seem to really love Mountain Dew for some reason. Mountain Dew is also apparently a big deal in Afghanistan, especially among the Taliban (you read that correctly), at least according to ex-Taliban prisoner Bowe Bergdahl, who said to Serial that the easiest way to piss off a Taliban fighter was to cut off his supply of sugary drinks — and apparently the Dew is especially popular.
• Another Chinese peculiarity: Pabst Blue Ribbon lager is considered a punchline in regards to its popularity with broke people, old Midwesterners and hipsters. In China? It's a premium brand sold for a fairly high price. Seriously!
• Tennent's Super Lager is considered in its home country of Scotland (and several other places) the favorite beverage of hobos and drunkards, so Scottish people are quite surprised to see that in Italy Tennent's is considered a cool, exotic drink and somewhat of an underground status symbol, as detailed in this article. The writer argues that Italians have a tradition of family dinners, so they spend much less time at the pub and are more suited to a strong lager, and that its peculiar taste is a good accompaniment to some of Italy's spicy dishes.
• Vimto, a British mixed-fruit-flavoured fizzy drink, is oddly popular on the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States) as the drink for the iftar (fast-breaking meal during Ramadan).
• Countless regional brands of soft drinks have fanbases far beyond their market. Examples include:
  • Cheerwine, a black cherry flavored soft drink mostly sold around North Carolina. However, most of the eastern U.S. can find it easily at Cracker Barrel, which also stocks bottles of several other localized soft drinks.
  • Vernors ginger ale. A favorite of Michigan natives, with origins in Detroit. It's all but ubiquitous in the Motor City, and popular not only to drink straight but also as a blended float with vanilla ice cream (the confusingly-named Boston cooler); some people (including Aretha Franklin, who was raised in Detroit) even cook with it (most typically in a ham glaze for Christmas). While Vernors is sold in other states, it's usually very hard to find—and when you can find a place that sells it, it is often sold out, as the strong flavor is much sought out by ginger ale fans.
  • Faygo. An inexpensive pop, also from Detroit, with a wide variety of flavors. Also the Trademark Favorite Food of the Insane Clown Posse and Juggalos.
  • Sprecher. A Wisconsin brewery that also makes soft drinks. The root beer in particular is a fan favorite, and was voted the best in the U.S. by The New York Times in 2008.
  • Nehi. Found mainly in the South.
  • Moxie. Found mainly in Maine (where it is the official state soft drink and has an annual festival devoted to it) and Massachusetts, has spread to other parts of the New England area, but found almost nowhere else on the planet.
  • Birch beer is another, particularly Polar brand. It's a slightly sweet soda with a pleasantly minty wintergreen-like flavor that's common in New England and other northeast states, but extraordinarily hard to find elsewhere, even though other Polar products are available in several markets outside their home territory.
  • Big Red. Found mainly in its native Texas and several areas of the South.
  • Ski. Found mainly in Tennessee and bordering states; was name-dropped by The Kentucky Headhunters in "Dumas Walker".
  • Cactus Cooler. Found mainly in Southern California and surrounding areas of the Southwestern US.
  • One of the most extreme cases is Green Spot, a non-carbonated orange-flavored drink founded in the United States. Having been obscure in its home country for decades, Green Spot is everywhere soft drinks are sold in Venezuela and Thailand, and its name is virtually synonymous with orange-flavored bottled drinks in these two countries.
  • In a similar vein to Green Spot, the non-carbonated orange juice and Orange drink brand Bireley's was founded in the US, but gained popularity in Asia during a postwar expansion. It was popular in Thailand (where notorious teen gangster Dang Bireley, who grew up near the Bireley's plant in Bangkok, got his nickname), Singapore, the Philippines, and especially Japan, where Asahi Breweries (through its Asahi Soft Drinks subsidiary) owns the name and is, to date, the only country where you can buy Bireley's.
• With the Coca-Cola Company having many brands, it's hard to believe some flavors popular in one country were actually invented in another:
  • Fanta was created by the German branch of Coca-Cola during World War II, when war shortages and the Allied blockade made it impossible to produce Coke in continental Europe. However, it is hugely popular in the United States, which is Fanta's biggest market by far. However, some flavors of Fanta aside from the traditional orange have proven to be a reverse example — for example, lemon Fanta is a hugely popular flavor in Europe, but it isn't sold anywhere in the United States; the Coca-Cola Company apparently noticed the European predilection for "lemonade" (which is a carbonated lemon soda in Europe, not a sweetened lemon juice drink) and accordingly introduced a new Fanta flavor to meet the demand. Several of the more obscure fruit flavors of Fanta (pineapple and fruit punch, in particular) are hugely popular in much of Central and South America. While those flavors are offered in the United States, they're very hard to find outside of exceptionally well-stocked supermarkets and convenience stores, and orange and grape are considered the "standard" Fanta flavors.^note Pineapple and strawberry are also pretty common, to the extent that they were represented in the "Four Fantanas", Coca-Cola's marketing mascots for the drink In places like Belize, though, fruit punch and pineapple Fanta are regularly sold in restaurants and street-corner soda machines, with orange and grape Fanta nowhere to be seen. Palate may have a lot to do with this: fresh fruit is considered very central to the Central American diet, which is reflected in their soft drink preferences. And while (green) apple Fanta is relatively obscure to nonexistent in Europe and North America; in Egypt, it's basically the standard Fanta, and much appreciated for the strong carbonation the local bottler has historically applied.
  • Sprite was also created by the German branch of Coca-Cola, though somewhat afterwards, made specifically to get some of that market the 7-Up Company enjoyed. Considering Sprite has since become Coca-Cola's second most popular drink, you'd be excused for thinking it was older than that and also American.
  • Nalu, a rather obscure energy drink by The Coca-Cola Company globally, is decently popular in the Benelux.
  • Beverly was an attempt by Coca-Cola at creating a non-alcoholic apéritif (pre-dinner) soft drink for the Italian market in 1969, and became popular enough in the seventies that it spawned a "clear" version, Beverly White (the "classic" version was red colored). The drink was ultimately removed from store shelves in Italy in 2009 due to "product consolidation", and that would have been the last that anyone had heard of Beverly... if, fifteen years earlier, someone at the World of Coca-Cola in America hadn't chosen Beverly White as one of the sixteen drinks to highlight in the museum's "around the world" tasting station. The drink became a novelty in America for its sharp, bitter taste, and although it's not actually bottled or sold en masse in the country, the syrup is still produced for tasting samples at the World of Coca-Cola as well as for two locations in Walt Disney World (Epcot's Club Cool and Disney Springs' Coca-Cola Store).
• The versions of Coca-Cola, Sprite, and Fanta bottled in Mexico are popular in the U.S., most likely because they are made with sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup (which has been the standard soft-drink additive in the U.S. since the late 1970s), and sold in glass bottles. These can sometimes be found at the likes of Family Dollar and Dollar General even in the smallest of towns.
  • In some parts of the U.S., major soft drink bottlers will release "throwback" editions, made with sucrose, in order to get a piece of this market. These have been so successful that PepsiCo has "Throwback" Pepsi and Mountain Dew in Retraux packaging as a permanent part of their lineup in the US (and South Australia, for some reason).
  • Coca-Cola's citrus soda brand Urge, better known in the U.S. as Surge, is now only sold in Norway, where it's far more popular than its PepsiCo equivalent, Mountain Dew. However, PepsiCo is still doing very well in Norway, primarily because of Pepsi Max.
• Pepsi Max, a low-calorie, sugar-free alternative to Pepsi, is more popular in the UK than regular Pepsi, thanks to extensive marketing throughout its lifespan that mainly appealed to more active customers. Meanwhile, 9% of PepsiCo's total worldwide production of Pepsi Max is purchased in Norway alone (the country has a population of about 5.3 million—more people live in Minnesota than live in Norway), where it easily outsells regular Pepsi and is a fierce competitor to the regular Coca-Cola (not Coca-Cola Zero, a sugar-free alternative). Pepsi Max indeed.
• Pepsi is more popular than Coke in the Middle East, mainly due to their historical honoring of the Arab boycott of Israel. Pepsico drinks greatly outnumber the sales of Coca-Cola drinks in the region. An example would be in UAE, the most popular drink is Mountain Dew.
• RC Cola was invented in Minnesota, but it enjoys the most popularity in the southeast US due to a borderline inexplicable association with the trailer park lifestyle. It was also sold at Arby's, which started in Ohio, for many years due to the two companies having formerly shared ownership. (Arby's offered franchises a choice of Coke or Pepsi for many years before securing a deal with Pepsi which expired in 2017.)
• Tea.
  • The British love it, even though it's a Chinese invention and they only got it in the 17th century (after the marriage of Charles II to the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza introduced the custom, which was then en vogue with the Portuguese aristocracy—Portugal being the first European power to establish direct shipping routes to the Far East). However, given how prevalent the Brits Love Tea trope is, you'd think they had tea for millennia. The British did, however, hit on the bright idea that you could also produce tea from the Indian Camellia assamica and not just the Chinese Camellia sinensis.
  • Russia is a close third after Brits among the Europeans (both are actually beaten by Ireland), but even the Irish cannot hope to catch up with Turkey as the most tea-drinking country on the planet.
  • In the United States, cooks from the sweltering southern half of the country discovered that tea was delicious if chilled and served over ice. While cold tea is unthinkable in some parts of the world, it's the default preparation in America, and is especially beloved in the South. "Sweet tea" is Serious Business. Incidentally, the current prevalence of black tea for Southern iced tea is much Newer Than They Think: historically, the tea was green, but World War II cut off the supply of green tea to the West (because the Japanese weren't about to sell theirs to the Americans, and shipments from China or Southeast Asia would have to cross Japanese lines). Southerners took to using black tea from British India, Ceylon, and East Africa, and the preference stuck after the war was over.
  • Green tea and oolong tea, originating in China, are also staples of Japanese cuisine. Milk tea, black tea with milk and sugar adapted from the British custom, is popular in cafes and ubiquitous in bottled form. Green tea was also popular in the West as a health food, where Matcha has become particularly trendy with urban hipsters in the U.S.
  • Tea bags are an American invention and have become the main way that British people make their tea. They have almost completely displaced loose leaf tea in the U.K. since their introduction after World War II. Loose leaf tea is mostly relegated to high-end specialty brands. They're also popular in other regions with strong tea cultures, such as Japan, for their sheer convenience compared to loose-leaf tea.
  • Lapsang souchong is a variety of Chinese tea. It is made from the fourth and fifth leaves of the tea plant, making it coarser and less flavorful. The tea was then speed-dried over pine smoke (per legend, the locals did this to speed up tea production ahead of armies or bandits looking to steal a large chunk of the crop). The Chinese turned up their nose at it, considering it barely-drinkable crap. But when the Dutch tried it, they couldn't get enough! The Russians, who picked up tea through trade via Mongolia, also got the smoked tea, and largely agreed with the Dutch. The strong smokey flavor worked well with the heaviness of Central and Eastern European cuisine. While Chinese eventually started to appreciate Lapshan in the mid-2000s, what they drink is an ultra-premium version on it called Jin Jun Mei, which is made from buds and are more lightly smoked—which means it's still isn't quite the same tea.
  • The diversity among Han Chinese allows the following example. Cantonese invented the lȅungchȁ herbal teas as a folk therapy for mild infections, and still consider it a medicine^note versions of it are in fact registered as traditional medicines in China, despite it has been canned and Tetra-packed, sold throughout China, and became the best-selling non-alcoholic drink in China—mainly by the other people who treat it as a drink.
  • While the rest of Germany and continental Europe is extremely coffee-crazy, the region of East Frisia has developed a distinctive tea culture of its own, with a "tea ceremony" consisting of rock sugar, strong black tea and cream, drunk unstirred.
  • The fact that the Chinese post-fermented teas like Pu'erh and Liu Bao still exist in the 21st century is mainly due to the Chinese diaspora. Throughout the 20th century the main markets for Pu'erh were Hong Kong and Macau, while Liu Bao was mainly sold to the Malayan Chinese since, as it was reported, no Chinese would work at a tin mine that didn't make that tea. Both teas weren't heavily drunk by mainland Chinese until the Turn of the Millennium. Similarly, Keemun originally produced an aged green tea called ancha, but after the Keemun red became popular, ancha's production purely depended on the Cantonese and Southeast Asian demand. The Japanese occupation of the British colonies in Asia directly caused the extinction of this tea for nearly 50 years, and it was only revived after a Singaporean tea merchant mailed some of his 1930s stockpile to the Anhui provincial department of agriculture, and asked whether it is still being produced—they still want new stock.
  • A thorough Lampshade Hanging for this: For most of the twentieth century tea constitutes a significant portion of China's export revenue, and so during the height of its Stalinist economics, teas were categorized by their market:
    • Internal-market teas: Mainly green and oolong. Even the dark-tea-liking Cantonese were given green tea rations.
    • Borderlands tea: Heavily subsidized post-fermented tea bricks sold to ethnic groups living on China's borders, especially the Mongols and Tibetans. It's a dietary requirement for them since it's nearly their only source of produce, so for centuries the inland has to provide large amounts of tea to those places to avoid a rebellion.
    • Diaspora tea: Sold to the Chinese diaspora in places where Beijing doesn't exert direct control. There's a bit of each type, but notably the aforementioned Pu'erh and Liubao are nearly always put into this category.
    • Export tea: Teas sold to the rest of the world. Mainly black tea, but also include post-fermented and smoked teas for countries along the Silk Road, and green tea for some countries such as Morocco.
• Australian-made chocolate energy drink Milo is practically a national icon in Malaysia, and is also popular in the rest of Southeast Asia, especially the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, and also popular in South American countries such as Chile and Peru.
• Sweden loves the Brooklyn Brewery. Sales in Sweden are larger than each American state except New York.
• Subverted in the case of the Slurpee. In its home country in the United States, 7-11 is famous for its Slurpee, a slush drink and is universally the symbol of the convenience store, to the point that July 11 (7-11 in American date rendering) is "Slurpee Day", and the chain gives out free Slurpees to customers. As detailed on this trope's Other page, 7-11 is such a huge hit in Japan that a Japanese company now owns a controlling interest in the franchise. This is despite the fact that the Slurpee was never embraced by the Japanese and in Japan the iconic product is not sold in a store otherwise known for that one product.
• Irn Bru, in addition to being Scotland's Other National Drink, is quite popular in Russia, which had five Irn Bru production plants at its peak in popularity and a series of weird adverts with Bru-coloured ostriches trying to keep their drink cool, and getting into fights with penguins.
• Old Milwaukee beer—a relatively minor brand with a mostly old-man-and-broke-hipster following in its native Midwest—is oddly popular in the U.S. territories, especially the U.S. Virgin Islands.
• Zima Clearmalt is very popular in Japan, to the point that the clear alcopop has continued being sold there after being discontinued in North America in 2008 due to its reputation as a "girly man" drink, a fact discussed in Real Men Hate Sugar (though it was later re-released for a limited time in the US in 2017-18, long after most people realized the "girly man" stereotype associated with it was born out of rampant homophobia). Strangely, despite being a strong believer of that trope, Zima doesn't have the same connotation in Japan.
• Boba is so big in the otherwise coffee-crazy southwestern US and Germany that everybody is expected to know what it is, and new businesses selling boba become popular through lightning-fast word-of-mouth. No matter how many boba places open up, demand remains insatiable. The Taiwanese idea to add balls of tapioca to beverages is that popular in these two parts of the world—and besides East Asia, seemingly nowhere else. As a result, asking someone about their familiarity with boba is a good way to tell if they're not from nearby. As proof of its popularity, boba tea is the thing most ordered for delivery in California, and uniquely to California, accordng to Yelp. This is likely due to the state being home to several East Asian immigrant communities.
• Ramune, which is an iconic carbonated soft drink in Japan sold in many festivals known for its glass bottle with a marble you push down to open. Like Hi-Chew and Pocky, it saw mainstream success overseas sold in many grocery stores outside the Asian and otaku demographic.
• Skol originated in Scotland as a pale lager and was Britain's best selling beer brand during the late Eighties, thanks to the TV ads featuring Hägar the Horrible, but its popularity gradually waned in the mid Noughties and is nowadays seen as "an old-fashioned cheap supermarket brand". The same cannot be said in Brazil, where it has become more successful there and is the best selling beer brand in the country.
• Milkis is a milky soft drink produced by Lotte Chilsung, a division of the joint Japanese/South Korean company Lotte, but it is more popular in Russia than in South Korea, to the point that the Russian singer Dora (Dariya Sergeevna Shichanova) promoted Milkis in an advertisement.
• Fernet Branca, a brand of amaro bitters produced and invented in Milan, Italy, in the 19th century, began exports at the turn of the decade. It saw its biggest mainstream success in two countries in particular: the United States during Prohibition, because it was technically marketed as medication and sold at pharmacies, and Argentina, where "fernet con coca" (Fernet and Coke) is basically a de facto national cocktail.

Cuisines

• Japanese cuisine in general has recently became popular in the West as health food.
• Across Britain, Indian food is popular for people who desire spicy cooking; it helps that many Asians (as in, from the Subcontinent) live in Britain, and have for generations. Indeed, they've been there so long that British "Indian" food is its own category right now (as with American "Chinese" food below, much British "Indian" food has been heavily altered to cater to British tastes for less spice and more sauces)—and this doesn't even count the "Anglo-Indian" dishes: British-like dishes that developed in response to the Raj (most often in the Indian-run kitchens of British colonial officials, but sometimes among the "Anglo-Indians"—people of part-British, part-Indian ancestry or elsewhere) like kedgeree, piccalilli, British-style chutney, Worcestershire sauce (note the tamarind!), and mulligatawny soup.
  • The British faiblesse for Indian cooking is even Older Than They Think. The first Indian restaurant in London opened in 1810, several decades before the first fish-and-chip shop.
• Similar to Indian food in England, Mexican food is the go-to spicy cuisine in the U.S. As with Indian food, it helps that there's a large Mexican-American population in the U.S., especially in the Southwest, much of which used to actually be Mexico. As with British Indian food, this comes in two forms: heavily modified to suit Anglo tastes, and actually trying to resemble authentic cuisine.
  • Ironically, Taco Bell, the most famous example of Mexican-style fast food in the U.S., was founded by an Anglo-American in California whose last name happened to be Bell (he originally ran a burger joint called "Bell's Hamburgers").
  • As for the more authentic stuff, anglos in regions with large Mexican populations (e.g. Chicagoland) have learned to appreciate it themselves. Particularly popular in the U.S. are "street tacos", authentic Mexican tacos with meat cooked on a griddle with corn tortillas placed next to the meat and topped with diced onions and cilantro. Names of cooked meat previously unknown to non-Mexicans like cabeza, buche, lengua, machaca and the elsewhere-mentioned al pastor are gradually becoming part of the American lexicon. The birria craze of the early 2020s is an example of this: birria is a rich, spicy traditional stew from Jalisco traditionally made with goat but today often made with beef, and it became something of a huge deal in he U.S. around 2020 thanks to Internet videos. While it did so in a somewhat untraditional form—made from beef, in tacos—this form was actually reasonably common and longstanding in Mexico itself before making its way north (it seems to originate from 1950s Tijuana) and captures the flavor of the traditional dish well. (Traditional goat birria in Jalisco is served in a bowl, and would be eaten either with a spoon or by using bits of tortilla as a utensil. That said the Jaliscienses aren’t about to complain about the beef or the taco form factor.)
• Chinese food is very popular in the U.S. Major cities have lots of Chinese restaurants, and even the smallest, most provincial town usually has one as well. Chinese cuisine was able to spread so thoroughly around the United States due to the use of Chinese labor in building railroads in the 19th century. Wherever a train station was built, a few Chinese workers would stay, creating a tiny little Chinatown along the railroads' paths.
  • Canada has its own version of Chinese cuisine, almost identical to that of the States, that spread around the country in the very same way it did south of the border.
  • In Germany, Chinese restaurants can even be considered one of the three pillars of generic lunchtime fast food (the other two being traditional German butcheries and the aforementioned kebab).
  • In Belgium it had a similar level of popularity. A lot of it could be attributed to a lot of the 60's and 80's youth cultures of the time (the very old albums of De Kiekeboes even had jokes about how Fanny loves going to them) who loved the idea of alternative and foreign stuff (which is, according to people, more American than anything else). Given how this was probably the closest you could get to real foreign stuff it is really not surprising that they loved those kind of establishments. Nowadays it seems however more mainstream in use, as a lot of those people grew up while still holding a liking for the food they ate.
  • Chinese food is quite popular amongst Jewish Americans, especially on Christmas when most restaurants are closed, with the notable exception of many Chinese restaurants. Wikipedia has an entire article on this phenomenon.
  • Peru has its own take on Chinese cuisine, locally known as chifa. Based on Cantonese cuisine but incorporating native Peruvian ingredients and traditions, it was first developed around 1920 by Cantonese immigrants in the country's capital of Lima. The city's elites were utterly fascinated by this cuisine and took to it instantly, with the rest of the country following their lead. Today, Lima alone has over 6,000 chifa restaurants at all price levels, with thousands more in other parts of the country. In recent decades, chifa has spread to several nearby countries. Conversely, chifa is considered to be so central to Peruvian cuisine that Peruvian restaurants abroad that mostly focus on more traditional Peuvian dishes will usually include a few chifa favorites as well.
  • For the U.S., it's by and large subverted in that the main "Chinese" dishes have very little origin in Chinese cuisine, being more meat-based and often including cheese, which isn't really present in authentic Chinese cuisine; many Chinese restaurants will have a different menu for Chinese customers. In areas with large Chinese-American populations, such as San Francisco, the food will be more authentic. In fact, the Chinese text often written on signs for Chinese restaurants actually read, "We serve westernized Chinese food," not the name of the establishment, as a heads-up for Chinese passers-by.
• The situation with Chinese food being taken and "Westernized" isn't entirely unique, as the Japanese have taken many classic dishes from the western world and adapted them to Japanese palates. Their take on Spaghetti (originating from Italy) involves cooking it with green peppers, onions and ketchup (unthinkable in authentic Italian cuisine). These kinds of "Easternized" dishes are known as "Yoshoku".
  • The Japanese, just like the British, are also crazy for curry. Also like the British, the Japanese have developed their curries to suit Japanese tastes and barely resemble authentic Indian curry (having been derived from British curry).
  • Other popular Yoshoku dishes are Korokke (derived from French Croquettes), Hamburg steak (Salisbury steak) and Omurice (as mentioned above). In fact, it's possible to order several of these different dishes combined into bizarre hybrids such as a Hamburg steak, topped with a pork cutlet, and smothered in curry (Curry also counts as Yoshoku, as it's based on the British curries of the 19th century).
  • Hot dogs, which are already an example of this trope in the U.S., became popular in Japan, brought over by American soldiers during the post-World War II occupation. The aforementioned spaghetti has similar roots; it's inspired from the Chef Boyardee canned pasta in American GI rations.
• Hong Kong has its own "Easternized" Western food in the form of the chachaanteng (literally "tea restaurant") cuisine. These cheap Greasy Spoon restaurants serve delightfully odd hybrids of Western and Cantonese food and drink like Hong Kong-style French toast (which consists of a sandwich that is dipped in beaten egg and deep fried), cheesy baked seafood fried rice, lemon chicken, Hong Kong-style curry (which like Japanese curry is based heavily on the British version), various custard dishes (particularly egg tarts, which are similar to Portuguese pasteis de nata—albeit with a much less involved process and a different, "Cantonese"-style custard^note Which is itself an import, probably from colonial British cooking. Chinese cooking didn't use dairy much if at all until 19th-century contact with Europeans, and the use of evaporated or condensed milk characteristic of Cantonese custard suggests British influence (the British went big on those two canned products, especially in places like China where local fresh milk supplies were poor or wouldn't keep in an era before refrigeration).—and probably came to HK from nearby Macao), and all kinds of variations on tea and coffee (including yuanyang, which is tea brewed in coffee). The trademark drink is the famous silk stocking milk tea, adapted from the British custom of drinking black tea with milk and sugar but with evaporated or condensed milk substituted for fresh milk. Chachaanteng culture has also spread outside Hong Kong to the nearby parts of mainland China in Guangdong province, particularly Shenzhen and the city of Guangzhou itself, since the 1997 return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule (and the simultaneous and somewhat related increase in living standards in China generally and the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong particularly). It's also developed a following in Hong Kong and Cantonese diaspora areas in the West.
• Rounding out the "Easternized" Western cuisines of East Asia, mainland Cantonese cuisine from Guangzhou and surrounding parts has "soy sauce Western cuisine". This cuisine looks a lot like Japanese yoshoku in some ways, with dishes that blend Western with traditional Cantonese technique. For instance, the "Swiss wings" (they have nothing to do with Switzerland and nobody knows why they're called that) of this style use both soy sauce and a Western-style roasted and reduced aromatic stock to give a savory flavor—with the added Canto twist that instead of roasting the meat for the stock, it's actually stir fried in a wok. The dishes are traditionally eaten from plates with forks (as opposed to bowls with chopsticks), but they are also thoroughly Chinese, with the tradition going back over a century (Zhou Enlai ^note Later a prominent Communist leader, becoming Number Two to Mao Zedong had his wedding reception at a famous soy-sauce Western restaurant in Guangzhou that was already seen as a stalwart establishment in 1925).
• In general, this happens whenever you get a large immigrant community in a city or region—eventually, the locals get a taste for this interesting new immigrant food, and start to insist to outsiders "you have to try an X place here, we have some of the best Xish food in the country" even if they don't quite regard it as being naturalized. A few good examples:
  • In the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul, there's a substantial community of Somalis that popped up since the early 1990s, mostly refugees from the civil war in Somalia (that's why Ilhan Omar, the first Somali American in Congress, was elected from a district centered in Minneapolis). Now that the community is increasingly settled, there are a growing number of Somali restaurants that are very popular (as of March 2015, Yelp lists 68 Somali restaurants in or near Minneapolis—compared with 30 in New York City), with locals of all backgrounds eating there, but unlike some of the more established communities (e.g. Scandinavian), Somali food is still seen as a bit exotic. The Somalis for their part have learned that the electric griddles used for making lefse, a traditional Norwegian potato flatbread that is all but ubiquitous in Minnesota, are also excellent for making their traditional spongy flatbread canjeero.
  • In the Detroit area, there's a large Arab American community, centered in the western suburb of Dearborn, dating back to the 1920s. The biggest wave of migration came after the 1970s, though. In any case, Middle Eastern food—especially Lebanese, but Iraqi and Yemeni also make a strong showing, as has Syrian since the civil war sent refugees to the region—is all over Metro Detroit; your typical Metro Detroiter can tell you what a good shawarma tastes like.
  • The West Coast of North America, especially around Vancouver, San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles, has large populations of people of Chinese ancestry. Restaurants serving more authentic Chinese cuisine are quite popular; actual Hunan-style cuisine actually has a following in California. Further east, New York, Chicago, Toronto, and Philadelphia all have large, healthy Chinese communities that also serve respectable and popular Chinese cuisines (historically Cantonese, but Sichuan and Northwestern Chinese flavors have become popular since the 2010s).
  • If you want to have authentic Indian/South Asian food but are not willing or able to go to the Subcontinent, your best bet by far is to visit Britain, particularly the major cities. The aforementioned "British Indian" or "Anglo-Indian" cuisine notwithstanding, the larger cities in Britain tend to have the kind of very large diaspora communities that allow them to field some extremely well-regarded and authentic Indian/South Asian restaurants that can definitely best anything you'll get outside of the Subcontinent itself.
  • If you're Americas-based and can't make it to Britain or India, New Jersey has two hotspots of good Indian cuisine: one in Jersey City (where there is an Indian-American neighborhood) and one in the towns of Edison and Iselin in northern Middlesex County (where the Indian community developed around the area's research institutions, particularly Rutgers University, the pharmaceutical industry, and telecom research). Basically everyone in North Jersey knows where to go for a good curry (and they will argue between whether you should go to Oak Tree Road in Middlesex or hit up Newark Avenue in Jersey City). A newer area (since the mid-2010s) for Indian cuisine on the East Coast is Philadelphia, which has started to develop a reputation for South Indian cuisine thanks to an influx of South Indians coming to work for Comcast and to a lesser extent biotech startups (though North Indian has also strengthened—in part thanks to a colony of the New Jersey community coming in for the same reason), but it's still a young, still-developing market. On the West Coast, the San Francisco Bay Area also has a lot of Indian restaurants, especially around Silicon Valley, with all the tech workers coming from India.
  • Korean cuisine is popular in Los Angeles due to the Korean-American community there. It's also a big deal in the southern part of Bergen County, New Jersey (on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, directly across from Upper Manhattan), which has some of the highest concentrations of Koreans outside Korea (the borough of Palisades Park actually has a majority of ethnic Koreans). There are also two prominent centers of Korean cuisine in/around Philadelphia—one in Southwest Philadelphia and one in the area around the tripoint of North Philadelphia, Northeast Philadelphia, and Cheltenham Township—where (much like Indian cuisine) there is a solid Korean culinary scene not quite as good as North Jersey's but which makes up for that by being substantially cheaper.
  • Houston has developed a reputation for Vietnamese cuisine, thanks to the size of the Vietnamese-American community there (primarily consisting of South Vietnamese refugees and their descendants), and Houstonians will use that as a basis to respond in typically Texan fashion if one maligns the quality of Asian food in their city. Several other cities in Texas and the Southeast also surprise outsiders with the quality of their Vietnamese food, as many refugees from Vietnam to the United States were resettled in the South.
  • Ethiopian cuisine is a staple in Washington, D.C. due to the city's large Ethiopian community; several Ethiopian and Ethiopian-run restaurants are DC institutions. Outside DC, West and Southwest Philadelphia have Ethiopian communities large enough to maintain restaurants that stand as mainstays of the city's culinary scene (more so than in New York or indeed any other U.S. metro besides D.C.). Likewise, Oakland and Berkeley, California have large enough Ethiopian and Eritrean communities to host multiple restaurants, going on decades.
  • Salvadoran cuisine is popular in DC's Virginia suburbs, home to a large community from that country.
  • Turkish cuisine is extremely popular in Germany, most especially in Berlin. Beyond the iconic (and heavily Germanized, or at least tailored to German tastes) döner kebap, more authentic Turkish fare can be found in many German cities, especially those of the former West Germany. Of course, it was West Germany that originally invited the Turks to come as guest workers in the 1960s and 70s, and in the intervening decades the (urban) Germans have gotten a taste for Turkish cookery.
  • Mirroring the Turkish experience on a smaller scale East Germany brought Vietnamese guest workers during the latter part of its existence. This led to the development of a thriving Vietnamese community and restaurant scene in post-unification Berlin; much like a Houstonian, a Berliner can tell the good pho from the so-so.
  • Several regions in the U.S. are noted for their Mexican food scenes. Most of these are extremely unsurprising, since they are regions that used to be part of Mexico and are still near the border—Oh, Texas and Southern California have great Mexican food? Tell us, is the sky still blue at noon on a clear summer's day?^note In all seriousness, do try to have Mexican food if you are ever in Texas, Southern California, Arizona, or New Mexico, and to a lesser extent Colorado and even Nevada and Utah. It really is quite excellent. The really interesting "good place for Mexican food" in the U.S. is actually Chicago, which one doesn't normally associate with Mexican anything, being 1,200 miles from the border and, well, Chicago—it's Midwestern and cold. But the Mexican community in Chicago is massive through decades of immigration,^note A little over 20% of Chicagoans claim Mexican ancestry. to the point where the city grinds to a halt on Mexican Independence Day every September. (The only other ethnic group that stops the Windy City like this is the Irish, who shut the city down for St. Patrick's Day.)^note The Poles probably could do the same but for whatever reason never have. There's probably a Polack joke in there somewhere, but we won't go looking for it. There is thus a large population both of cooks who know what they're doing and customers who demand high-quality and authentic Mexican cooking, making Chicago a destination for aficionados of Mexican cookery. An important caveat: Because Chicago's Mexican restaurant scene caters heavily to the largely working-class Mexican community of the city, the cuisine in question runs towards street food and simple, hearty working-people fare—stuff like elote,^note Corn on the cob in the Mexican style, coated in lime-flavored mayonnaise and chili powder tortas de milanesa de pollo,^note Chicken cutlet sandwiches with all the Mexican fixin's menudo,^note Tripe soup/stew and tacos de lengua^note Tacos filled with slow-cooked beef tongue and (different) Mexican fixin's rather than the more elaborate, arty dishes you might find in, say, L.A. (or for that matter in Mexico City).
• Thanks to a large Japanese-American population, Japanese cuisine has had a major influence on Hawaiian cuisine, most notably with spam musubi mentioned above, a "Westernized" Japanese dish. Sashimi and bento, known as the "plate lunch," also became popular in Hawaii before they ever did on the mainland U.S. as well.
• Hawaiian cuisine, for that matter, also has a cult following on the mainland, especially on the West Coast.
• Similar to Indian cuisine in the U.K. and Mexican cuisine in the U.S., North African cuisine is popular in France. Couscous is listed in the top ten most popular dishes in France, especially in Eastern France. Vietnamese cuisine is also very popular. It helps that both cuisines were heavily influenced by French cuisine during the colonial era and that many North Africans and Vietnamese live in France, similar to Indian people in the U.K. and Mexican people in the U.S.

Restaurants

• In general, this is true of any American restaurant chain with limited regional distribution. Many people will go out of their way to pursue a location of a "cult" chain while passing up its more mainstream competitors, even to the point of making a whole road trip out of it, though some people are inevitably disappointed when finally sampling a restaurant they've heard is so good. "It's just another burger place." Examples include:
  • Arctic Circle. Originated and headquartered in Utah, where the majority of the locations are, but also popular in Idaho, and there are a few scattered locations in other Western states.
  • Biscuitville, a relatively small chain of breakfast restaurants largely endemic to the Piedmont area of North Carolina (with a few locations in Virginia). Best known for (as the name implies) their signature breakfast biscuits that the chain prides itself on making from scratch every fifteen minutes, visitors to the area from the far eastern or western parts of the state (or out-of-state) who know to look for them are known to pop by a Biscuitville to try their biscuits while passing through the area.
  • Bojangles' Chicken. Popular mostly in the Carolinas (its origin state, North Carolina, has the most locations), but has other locations scattered across both the Deep South (Alabama and Georgia in particular), the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic region.
  • Braum's. Popular in the Southwest, with locations only found within a 300-mile radius of their Oklahoma home base to keep their milk fresh. And that's imperative, as they're well-known for their ice cream.
  • Burgerville, a regional chain limited to Oregon and southwest Washington, is renowed for its emphasis on fresh ingredients. The chain itself lampshades this by having billboards near locations that warn drivers that there will not be another Burgerville location for 24,700 miles (39,750 km), which is the distance to the next Burgerville should one continue around the globe in that direction.
  • Checkers and Rally's, two sibling chains with unified branding. The former is mainly in the Southeast and the East coast, and the latter is mainly in the Midwest with a few locations on the West coast; and some states have locations of both. Their signature seasoned fries are sold in the frozen food sections of grocery stores throughout the country, even in areas where neither chain operates.
  • Cook Out. Popular in the South (and Maryland), but originated in the Carolinas.
  • Culver's, a primarily burger-based fast food chain (noted for "butterburgers" somewhat based on a Wisconsin specialty) and also renowned for advertising deep-fried cheese curds rather than french fries as the primary side^note Fries are available, you're just Not Doing It Right if you order them instead of the cheese curds and for its in-store root beer and frozen custard. Although born and based in Wisconsin (hence the emphasis on dairy) and strongest in the Midwest, it has a few locations as far away as Idaho and Florida. Tourists in the Midwest—even just passing through on a road trip—often make a point of stopping at a Culver's to sample the fare.
  • Del Taco. Mostly found on the West Coast, but has had a few on and off franchises east of the Mississippi (the only consistent one being Detroit).
  • Fatburger is another popular California burger chain that gets harder to find the further east you go.
  • HuHot Mongolian Grill. Mostly found in the Midwest and mountain states, with a few locations as far west as Texas.
  • Hot 'n' Now, a low-price hamburger chain once owned by Taco Bell, is down to exactly one location in Sturgis, Michigan (a tiny town 40 miles from Kalamazoo). The Last of His Kind nature has been known to attract visitors from several states away.
  • Krystal and White Castle (yes, that one), two very similar chains that are equally known for their "slider" burgers. The former is in the Southeast, and the latter in the Northeast/Midwest (with Kentucky and Tennessee featuring both), and neither is in the West, barring a lone White Castle in Las Vegas and another in Scottsdale, Arizona. However, many stores throughout the country sell White Castle burgers in the frozen food section.
  • Imo's Pizza. The regional chain (limited to Missouri, with a few stores in border locations in Illinois and Kansas) is the definitive implementation of "St. Louis-style pizza", with a hard cracker-like crust, topped with Provel cheese (a processed cheese somewhere between swiss, provolone, and mozzarella). Stores will sell frozen pizzas for tourists to take back home.
  • In-N-Out, on the West Coast (California mostly), is renowned for its burgers and its "secret menu" items. There was even an April Fools' Day joke about In-N-Out opening a location in New York City. The popularity is such that people even camped out at the first location in Texas when it opened in 2011.
  • Jack in the Box. Mostly found on the West Coast (and mostly endemic to its native California and Texas), but has a few franchises located east of the Mississippi (examples include Cincinnati, Nashville, Charlotte and Louisville) and a single franchise in Guam. It's renowned for its tacos and other finger foods such as egg rolls, as well as for its burgers such as the Jumbo Jack and Sourdough Jack, with its humorous ads featuring its wise-cracking, snarky mascot Jack Box also earning the chain national recognition.
  • Nathan's Famous. A hot dog brand found mainly in New York. As with White Castle sliders, they are often available for purchase in supermarkets even in markets where Nathan's has no actual restaurants.
  • Royal Farms. An odd chain originally from Baltimore (and conceived as a way to sell chicken from Maryland's Eastern Shore and neighboring rural Delaware), its claim to fame is that it's a gas station/convenience store with truly excellent (for fast food) fried chicken. The advance of "RoFo" out of its traditional territory in Delaware and Maryland into nearby New Jersey was the topic of endless fascination from NJ news outlets, largely because of the fried chicken (and the novelty of getting good fried chicken at a gas station).
  • Sheetz from Western Pennsylvania. A convenience-store chain (and also a gas station) that also does a line in made-to-order foods like burgers, fries, and sandwiches. Perpetual (but largely friendly) rival of the Eastern Pennsylvanian Wawa (they seem to have a tacit agreement to stay out of each other's respective territories).
  • Skyline Chili from Cincinnati. See "Cincinnati Chili" in the "Particular dishes" folder above.
  • Sonic Drive-In. A popular one among Southerners, who can often find them in even the smallest of towns. They're not as popular north of the Mason-Dixon line, however, though they do have locations throughout Great Plains and even as far east as Massachusetts.
  • Taco John's, a "West-Mex"-based taco chain noted for their famous "Potato Olé" potato bites, originated as a small restaurant chain localized mostly within the Rocky Mountains, but became wildly popular in the Great Plains and especially the Midwest when the franchise expanded eastward, with the first of its restaurants to make more than one million dollars in sales being a location in Iowa. Several states in the Midwest, such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the aforementioned Iowa now have more Taco John's locations than the franchise's origin state of Wyoming does.
  • TacoTime — two chains use the name, TacoTime based out of Eugene, Oregon and Taco Time Northwest (which is a franchisee that broke off from the rest of the chain) based out of Renton, Washington. The former is mostly found on the West Coast of the U.S. (with a few locations in the Western Canadian provinces as well) while the latter is exclusively found in parts of Washington.
  • Twisters, a small chain located primarily in New Mexico with 2 additional locations in Colorado, is known for its fast-food take on New Mexican cuisine, especially its green chile cheeseburgers and burritos. However, the chain's biggest claim to fame is for one of their Albuquerque locations being used as a location of the fictional fried chicken chain Los Pollos Hermanos in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, with said location becoming a pilgrimage site for fans of the two shows.
  • Whataburger. So beloved in its native Texas that towns as large as Temple (population 60,000+) are completely devoid of Burger King.
  • Waffle House. Mostly found in the South, but has a few franchises as far east as Pennsylvania and as far west as Arizona.
  • Wawa: a beloved dairy/sandwich shop/convenience store/gas station found mainly in the Delaware Valley (around Philadelphia/South Jersey) and Florida (where it initially targeted itself towards Delaware Valley transplants in the state). Operates on a business model similar to the Western PA-based Sheetz, with which it has a mostly-friendly rivalry (they seem to have a tacit agreement to stay out of each other's respective territories).
  • Yogi Bear's Honey Fried Chicken, a Yogi Bear-themed fried chicken restaurant chain once owned by Hardee's, is down to one remaining location in Hartsville, South Carolina (a small town 1 hour outside Myrtle Beach). The Last of Its Kind nature of the restaurant has made it a minor tourist attraction for the town, attracting both foodies and Hanna-Barbera fans alike.
• Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits is extremely popular in Asia, Korea especially. At one point, Popeye's had more stores per capita in Korea than anywhere else in the world.
• There's also the curious example of award-winning local barbecue joints. To tourists, they're like the Mecca of smoked meat. To locals, they're a relatively inexpensive place to pick up lunch. This disparity can be seen in places like Arthur Bryant's in Kansas City, with natives snacking on a $10 combo plate beneath pictures of former U.S. Presidents.
  • Barbecue itself is a curious example. While the etymology is not entirely known, it most likely derives from a Taino or Carib word as the first accounts of something people today would recognize as Barbecue comes from Spanish conquistadors and administrators from the area describing local food preparation. When and how this got to the Southern US is not entirely clear, though slavery (which was very prevalent in the Caribbean) certainly played a part. Due to migrations out of the South to other parts of the US (in part fleeing racism and poverty, in part in search for industrial jobs), cities that are as far from the Deep South as you can get have now developed their own barbecue traditions. That isn't to say that either the Caribbean or the Southern tradition ever died out, though; indeed, the South (and Missouri) is considered the heart of barbecue culture in the US by both Black and White aficionados, with the Carolinas in particular being considered the Motherland of smoked hog.
• China apparently loves KFC; it's the largest global fast-food chain in the country. A Chinese-American KFC executive who spent some time at the Asian unit has attributed this to three things: first, KFC was one of the first Western fast-food chains to break into the Chinese market; second, fried chicken is, generally speaking, a familiar dish to the Chinese (although the American recipe is obviously different), while hamburgers and such are entirely alien; and third, KFC has put hard work into tailoring its products to suit Chinese tastes, including adding uniquely Chinese ingredients like tree fungus and duck sauce to its sandwiches and by emphasizing its spicy-chicken dishes (apparently, Chinese consumers prefer their fried chicken spicy).
  • An interesting note is that many Chinese consider KFC a "healthier" alternative to local fast food. Not because they think greasy fried chicken is healthy, but due to the numerous health violations local fast food chains have been involved in over the years, particularly the use of gutter oil ^note  oil that has been 'recycled' from fryers, grease traps and even slaughterhouse remnants by many of KFC's local competitors to cut operating costs (though gutter oil has largely disappeared since about 2015 after a nationwide crackdown on health standards).
  • KFC is popular in some parts of India as well- likely because it doesn't serve beef or pork.
  • KFC is so popular in Thailand that a slang term for fried chicken is "Kentucky", regardless of if it's made at a KFC restaurant (or in Kentucky) or not.
  • KFC is also such a big hit in Trinidad and Tobago that some of the locals jokingly refer to it as a food group. Other Caribbean countries with KFC restaurants and a large enough population with the money to buy the stuff tend to latch on to it too, but not quite to the extent as the people of Trinidad and Tobago.
  • KFC is very successful in Japan, and has firmly cemented itself into Japanese Christmas traditions with people reserving their Christmas chicken dinners months in advance. It is such a well-established tradition that people in Japan think it's a tradition in the United States too and are surprised when they visit during the holidays and don't see KFC food everywhere.^note The reason for that is Americans stationed at Japan use KFC as a turkey substitute.
• On the topic of Japan, McDonald's is also very popular in Japan even rivaling KFC. In that country, Ronald McDonald starred in a series of Japanese commericals called "Ronald Rumors" which ran from 2004-2007. Ronald alongside Mcdonalds gained huge memetic statis in Japan due to Ronald's Japanese catchphrase "Ran Ran Ruu!" spawning tons upon tons of remixes on Nico Nico Douga and other Japanese websites. Japanese fans would even start an annual Collabo with Americans that remixes Touhou music alongside various popular songs from various Japanese media combined with archived commericals from the Mcdonaldland era and material from The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald by Klasky-Csupo. Due to KFC and McDonald's being popular with Japanese audiences, there's a Running Gag in Japanese Ronald McDonald remixes that finds way to take a jab at KFC (mainly Colonel Sanders) in very creative ways.
• Although it only has a handful of locations outside of the U.S., the most popular Five Guys restaurant in the world is the one located in Covent Garden, London.
• In the 1990s, Kenny Rogers Roasters had a brief fling in the U.S. The chain came crashing down by the late 1990s, but continued to sporadically operate in the U.S. until the early-2010s (the last one to close was in a mall food court in California). However, the chain was bought by a Malaysian company and has remained extremely popular in Southeast Asia and the UAE.
• The restaurant chain Big Boy, once nationwide, still has a cluster of locations in Michigan, plus six in Los Angeles, one in Bismarck^note a very bizarre, drive through-only location which sells only burgers and fried chicken, the latter not typically found at Big Boys, and two in Cleveland. Most of the remaining US ones are remnants of the former franchises of the chain: the Michigan ones are leftovers from Elias Brothers, the Detroit-based franchisee that bought the whole chain in 1987; the Los Angeles ones are the last vestiges of Bob's Big Boy; and the Cleveland ones are remnants of Manners. Former Big Boy franchises Eat 'n' Park (Pittsburgh), Shoney's (South),^note Yes, Rick and Morty fans, that Shoney's. and JB's (Mountain states and California) also continue to exist in various capacities, although they have severed their ties to Big Boy. There is also Frisch's in and around Cincinnati, which still uses the Big Boy logo and menu, but otherwise has no corporate connections to the rest of the chain. Finally, there are also several remaining in Japan.
• White Spot, a popular burger-eatery in British Columbia, have only exceeded in expanding to Alberta. On the other hand, the fast-food version, Triple O's, has successfully opened up three restaurants in Hong Kong, where they sell twice as much as an average location back in Canada each. Other branches have opened up in the Philippines and in South Korea. This can be partly explained by the large Hong Kong immigrant population in greater Vancouver.
• McDonald's and KFC in general in China, where there the stores are run as medium class restaurants rather than just a fast food chain (probably because Chinese-style fast food is much cheaper than a Big Mac). Menus in China generally were much more diverse and exceptionally longer than in America where you can literally find things like fried rice or burgers with cabbage in them, and plenty else besides. At least one McDonald's in Hong Kong delivers pizzas. That has led to at least some of the international students' complaint that McDonald's in America sucks, at least until McDonald's began offering delivery stateside via third-party apps.
  • McDonald's also appears to be very popular in the New England region of the States (and probably equally as popular as homegrown New England creation Dunkin' Donuts), as evidenced by towns as small as Townsend, Massachusetts (pop. 8,926 at a 2010 estimate) having at least one location.
• Tim Hortons is primarily a Canadian fast food doughnut/coffee/bakery chain (basically a cross between a Dunkin' Donuts and a Panera, but not in a yuppie-ish Starbucks kind of way). But it has a couple of extremely successful U.S. markets, mostly around the eastern Great Lakes area (especially Buffalo and Detroit) and Maine (or in other words, the parts of the US most like Canada, pace Minnesota). It also has a heavy presence in and around Ohio, an artifact of when the chain was briefly owned by Ohio-based Wendy's. It is also guaranteed to attract expatriate Canadians and Americans from Hortons-heavy regions of the country (the one full-service^note There are a number of "Tim Hortons Express" locations in NYC, but they don't make the baked goods onsite and are generally regarded as inferior to the full-service locations. Tim Hortons in Greater New York, in Somerville, NJ, regularly sees a bunch of cars with New York plates and Canadian-flag bumper stickers in its parking lot even though it's a full hour west of Manhattan and you need to pay tolls for the Holland Tunnel and I-78).
• Gloria Jean's Coffees has about 110 coffee houses in its native USA, and over four times that in Australia. Eventually, the holders of the Australian (and international) licensing rights bought the North American rights as well, and both the menu and the decor of the American locations have an Australian touch (with some Australian tchotchkes on the walls and pride of place given to Aussie coffee creations like the long black and flat white).
• Stumptown Coffee Roasters (based in Portland, OR) has gotten fairly popular in New York City.
• The Baskin-Robbins ice cream chain is fairly popular in the US. But in Japan, where it's called Thirty-One after the "31 flavors" in the logo, it's absolutely massive (as one would expect from the "ice cream" example above), with local flavors including green tea and the Pop Rock-infused "Popping Shower," sundaes served on crepes, and successful cross-promotions with many anime and video game series, most notably Puzzle & Dragons.
• Mister Donut. Once a popular chain of doughnut shops in the US, it was bought out and absorbed almost completely by its chief competitor Dunkin' Donuts in the early 90's. However, the chain thrives in Japan (and other Asian markets, to a lesser extent) with over 400 locations.
• Generally, whatever American fast food chain arrives first in Thailand becomes popular there, with latecomers struggling to carve out a piece of the market for themselves. Early-bird arrivals include McDonald's, Pizza Hut, KFC (as mentioned above), Baskin-Robbins (which the locals insist is called "31" like in Japan; they won't know what you're talking about if you call it "Baskin-Robbins"), Mister Donut, and most recently, Taco Bell. American fast food is popular there, particularly in urban areas, as they can be prepared and cooked faster than native dishes. In addition, except for the wealthy and those already in the food business, houses will tend not to have kitchens, meaning the people there are very dependent on eating out. However, because of the lower income levels in Thailand compared to the United States, these chains tend to be middle- to upper-range establishments, found mainly in upscale shopping malls.
• Taco Bell, while a hit or miss restarant in its home country, the USA, is pretty popular in Japan. When it opened up a store in Shibuya, Tokyo—the first Taco Bell location in Japan—many locals waited as long as an hour to try it out, and it has remained fairly popular since. (For instance, Eiichiro Oda, author of One Piece, will sometimes go to Taco Bell and order 50 tacos to share with his crew and editors.)
• South African-born chicken chain restaurant Nando's is so popular in the UK many people don't realise it isn't a British creation. Additionally, although the dishes it's famous for—largely variants on flame-grilled chicken with peri peri) sauce—are very popular in South Africa, their roots are in Portuguese and Mozambican cuisine.
• For some reason, Krispy Kreme has become really popular in Australia. The first outlet to open in South Australia led to someone being robbed at knife-point by someone who wanted their donuts.
  • Krispy Kreme is more popular overseas, whereas in the USA, it is just another average donut shop—except in southern California, which is this trope contained within the United States. In southern California, Krispy Kreme is practically a phenomenon, with lines going out the door every evening and each customer buying dozens and dozens of donuts. It's particularly striking as it's extraordinarily difficult for other big donut chains to get established in southern California, as the natives by and large reject most other chains, Dunkin' Donuts included—when it opened its store in Pasadena in 2017—the first Dunkin' store in the region in decades—they also decided to drop the "Donuts" name from the sign, beginning a trend of de-emphasizing donuts for the chain.
• Although Dairy Queen (founded in Illinois and based in Minnesota) has a pretty much nationwide presence in the US and Canada, their biggest market is Texas. So much so that the DQ franchisees in Texas have their own marketing arm and sell many market-specific items, including an entirely different burger and hot foods menu called "Texas Country Foods".
• Pollo Campero, a fried chicken chain founded in Guatemala and currently headquartered in the United States (where it is mostly endemic to Texas), is oddly popular in China, with its Beijing location always packed.
• Spanish frozen yogurt shop llaollao is very popular in Singapore, that one of its outlets are always packed.
• Pioneer Chicken has almost completely disappeared in its native country of the United States, as competitor Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits purchased the chain and converted every Pioneer into a Popeyes (with the exception of three independently-run restaurants). It lives on, however, in Indonesia as California Fried Chicken, which presently has as many restaurants there as Pioneer had at its peak.
• Wimpy is a hamburger chain (named after the character from Popeye) founded in 1934 in the United States and became very popular in the UK and especially South Africa, whose locals love them so much that it's now headquartered there in Johannesburg. By 1978 though, Wimpy had become obscure in the United States and, without anyone willing to take over American operations after the founder's death, disappeared from the US completely.
• Ajisen Ramen is an inconsequential ramen store in Kumamoto, even locally^note The brand owner eventually acquired an actually locally famous one in The New '10s from the franchising income.. Its claim to fame are its foreign franchisees in the rest of East Asia; to the point that many a Chinese speaker has their first non-instant ramen eaten at an Ajisen and it became a codifier for Japanese ramen in these regions.
• There are about three times as many Shakey's Pizza restaurants in the Philippines as there are in its home country of the United States. So loved is Shakey's there that its code in the Philippine Stock Exchange is simply "PIZZA".
• Quiznos is extremely popular in Costa Rica. They have one in every single shopping center. It may not be tremendously successful in the USA- but in Costa Rica, it is excelling.
  • In general Ticos have taken quite a liking to US fast food chains. You will find almost as many different chains in San José, Costa Rica as you will in San José, California. Even Taco Bell (which famously got thrown out of the country in protest when they tried to enter the Mexican market) has a strong presence.
• The whole concept of a doughnut shop is popular in the New England region of the US. Doughnut shops are everywhere and the region is considered to be Dunkin' Donuts' home territory for good reasons; they were founded in Massachusetts and have locations almost everywhere in the New England region. This is likely helped by plenty of regions having some form of a fried dough snack already, from the New Orleans beignet, to the Native American frybread, to the Itailian zeppole, to the Chinese youtiao. The doughnut itself is thought to have originated in the Netherlands and evolved into its modern form in New York City when it was a Dutch colony.
• An oddly specific one: Vietnamese tourists on package tours to the U.S. East Coast tend to focus on visiting D.C. and New York. They skip Baltimore completely, rarely make it as far as Boston, and generally only hit the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia... but while in Philly, they make a point of visiting one South Philly Vietnamese restaurant that they say makes Vietnamese food just like they get back home.
• A&W Restaurants was one of the earliest fast food chains. While it is still around in the US, it's not as big of a chain as it used to be. However, in neighboring Canada, where the Canadian operations have been part of a separate and unaffiliated chain since 1972, it's still huge, and is second only to McDonald's in terms of the most locations for a fast-food chain in Canada.
• The Max Brenner chain of chocolate/dessert-centric cafes originated in Israel, but it's biggest market by far is Australia, which has double the amount of locations as there are in its home country.
• Ichiran is a ramen chain restaurant originated in Kyushu which specializes in using tonkotsu broth. It is known for being designed for introverts by having individually divided seats. They have branches across Japan and a few overseas and it also sells instant ramen kits. The business seem attract a lot of international tourists in major cities leading to long lines because of the hype on social media, the algorithm, and being foreign-friendly by providing multilingual signage, thus reducing the language barrier.

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