What is the best Asian cuisine and why is it Thai?

too bad my korean roommates aren't also cooks
I mean, the food they make is good, but not really great

>good but not really great
That's Korean food for ya. It's the culinary world's C+ student.

Ouch. But true.

>falling for the thai food meme

It's like you've never had Vietnamese food.

>Vietnamese cuisine master race reporting in
All the best parts of Asian and French cuisine mane

>watery soup
>good

So you've only had phõ?
Poor guy

Not him, but what is Vietnamese cuisine like beyond Pho, Banh Mi, and those noodle bowls with the fish sauce?

I wouldn't even say they're good. Just okay. Edible but I wouldn't go out of my way to eat it. Their BBQ is the only thing that I like. Couldn't care less about their millions of mediocre sides dishes. Basically SEA is god-tier for food. Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc etc. Except the Philippines though. Their food is an abomination.

Go to any Vietnamese restaurant and they'll have a menu that's longer than the line of guys lining up to fuck your mother.

That's the classics, and a good bahn mi is amazing. Phõ is like fast food in Vietnam
I can't lost off dishes, but most include fish sauce, rice and seafood with some borrowed French techniques. When I was in Vietnam I tried the gauntlet from eel soup to jellyfish salad. Nobody could translate what the dishes were to me because their language sounds like nonsense to me.
God and the steamed pork buns..I had that for breakfast like every day

I'm surprised there are that many necrophiliacs who know her.

>any
If you mean the average "opportunistic chinese open a vietnamese restaurant to capitalize on memes", it's literally just the following ingredients combined in infinite ways:
>long grain rice
>broken rice
>rice vermicelli
>sliced beef
>beef tendon
>BBQ pork chops
>chicken
>shrimp
>fish balls

Remember that any of the meats may be combined with any one or more of the other meats

There, I just gave you a 3 page menu, just add Beer 33, Tsingdao for some reason, tea, vietnamese iced coffee, thai iced tea for some reason, a variety of soda-pops, and if you're really going for the gullible whites, maybe some bubble tea or some such thing

What are their pork buns like? How is the pork cut and cooked? What was the eel soup like?

I meant a proper restaurant rather than a lowest common denominator takeaway joint.

Here's a small grab from my local Vietnamese place. Vietnamese is probably on par with Thai and more popular than Chinese where I live.

>crocodile

Damn, I wanna try that.

The beef was shredded, the bun was rice based and steamed and had an excellent almost eggy texture
>Eel soup
Fucking fantastic. They threw the eel in live and let the soup cook with its bones and everything which gave it an excellent umami flavor.

>smelly, sour south East Asian food

No, it's quite inferior

What is your preference then?

>They threw the eel in live and let the soup cook with its bones and everything
Them azns are cruel but it seems to make for tasty stuff.

>I saw an old lady beat a shark to death with a club and she then made a three course meal out of the whole damn shark

Shit never happens in America man, but goddamn it was delicious

At least she ate the whole thing. The bad thing about shark fishing is that a lot of people (mainly the Chinese) will just cut the fins and leave the carcass. How'd she do the shark?

Ladyboys have very discerning palates.

>Korean? You mean Monotony: The Cuisine?
Woah calm the fuck down there guy, I'm in worst korea rn, and the street food is pretty top tier. Squid balls need to be in every country.

Shark fin soup, grilled shark, some of it was served raw, and some other variations on that I can't fully remember

If you count India; Indian food. They are the spice masters. There is a lot of beautiful, light, fragrant Indian food people are unaware of. They make the best bread in Asia- honorable mention to Vietnam. Naan and roti are both from India, and imo are far superior to SE Asian roti. It's very regional so there is a lot of diversity.

I think there's a case for Japanese food too. It's normally simple and boring and everyday people have a bad deal, but sushi and sashimi's simple dishes with the focus on ingredient quality and perfection is maybe the best in the world, alongside Italy.

Went to a Thai restaurant and they had this as one of their noodle soups. It was stewed beef noodle soup. It was spicy and pretty amazing. Anyone know the Thai name for it?

I haven't had Thai yet, but I've enjoyed several kinds of Asian cuisine.

Japanese > Southern Chinese > Filipino > Vietnamese > Northern Chinese > Korean > Persian > Middle Eastern > Indian

I am actually surprised by how some Filipino and Vietnamese food are, mostly their beef and tomato stews.
I've not had enough Northern Chinese food, so it might rise in the ranks should I have it.
The only time I've had Indian, I was revolted by how strong the spices were. I am scared of testing anything else from Indian food after tasting Indian curry.

It might be "kuay tiow reua."

burmese > korean > vietnamese > thai > chinese > phillipino

>Squid balls
>eating an animal's balls
faggot

Thanks man!

>tfw there's nothing better than eating at a streetside stall in SE Asia at night while eating noodle soup

The tiny chairs, the tiny table, the delicious bowl of soup, the spiciness, the crisp feel of slight wind, oh man, there's nothing better.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but squid balls can be found not only in Korea, but also China, Philippines, and Japan, right? Because I think squid balls have a Chinese historical origin to it, if I remember it correctly. So you might probably be able to find it wherever a Chinese expat community lives in.

Going to try some Thai later this month.
Can anyone tell me what to look out for so I know I'm eating authentic Thai food.

Wait you haven't had Thai food, ever? I am worried about you.

You can, for the most part, trust airlines to deliver you to the country you intended to travel to, assuming you bought a ticket and got on the plane. Once in the country, you can eat anywhere and have "autentic COUNTRY NAME cuisine".

Perhaps your question has more to do with the quality of food you might want to eat in a foreign country

No time to travel outside the country anymore because of work, so I have to go to Asian quarters of the city I live in to find authentic food.
And you can find authentic food in the US. I have found that if you look well enough, you can get authentic Japanese, Southern and Northern Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, and Indian food. Korean, Middle Eastern, and Persian as well. Authentic Southern and Northern Chinese food are very hard to find in the US, because a lot of them are American Chinese cooking. That said, you just have to look a bit harder to find them (and understand Chinese runes to know what you're looking for). Filipino food is actually very difficult to Americanize, because in some respects, it's already kind of sweet, even in their home country. Middle Eastern food tastes like Middle Eastern food in whichever country I've had it. Japanese is a bit harder to find authentic, but much easier than Chinese cuisine. Vietnamese is much easier to find isolated from Americanization, and so is Indian and Korean food.
I actually have a much harder time finding authentic German, Italian, and French cuisine where I'm at.

And that's why I'm back to asking what signs should I look for to know I'm eating authentic Thai food. Not everyone can just up and leave to travel halfway around the world just to eat something and not expect important work to be piled up when they come back a week later.

power rankings with justifications:

Top tier:
1. Viet
Amazing balances of sour, sweet, salty, spicy, umami in almost every dish. Fantastic bbq flavors, great use of brown sugar, fish sauce, and lemon grass. Great variety of hot and cold dishes and they're almost all amazing.

2. Malaysian
Malay islands have a huge variety of spices and fresh foods to pick from, good combination of SE Asian, South Chinese, and Indian flavors, lots of different kinds of curries, amazing stirfries, seafood, coconut stuff, chili pastes, fish pastes. Only downside is that sambal seems to make too many appearances and spiciness dominates in virtually every dish except for explicitly Hoklo/Hainan or Indian foods.

3. Thai
Everyone knows why it's good but people don't tend to acknowledge its shortcomings. Has a handful of very strong dishes, but not a lot of variety, fried foods are pretty weak, tom yum soups can be kind of unbalanced, too few non-soup foods, stirfries other than pad thai are weaker than their Chinese or Viet counterparts, obsessive use of the same 6 or 7 spices.

4. Taiwanese
Very underrated cuisine, has some spice but never overwhelming, lots of variety of herbs, spices, meats, great fried foods, great dumplings, refreshing herbal soups, good quality interpretations of foreign foods, nice use of five-spice, aromatic sausages, seafood, loads of tropical fruits, best beverages in the world (bubble tea, avocado milk, calamansi juice, smoked sour plum juice, winter melon punch, almond tea, peanut rice milk, the list goes on forever), decent Asian desserts (but terrible Western desserts)

>taiwanese in top tier
>not chinese
Come on, Chinese should be a shoe in just because of the variety

Middle tier:
Many kinds of SE Asian: good but lacking in notable dishes
Various Indian cuisines: tasty but little variety beyond curry and curry spiced foods
Various Chinese cuisines: altogether strong, but usually plagued by a lack of variety within any local variant. Lots of variety if you consider the entire country one cuisine, but you shouldn't.
Korean:
Delicious but devoid of variety. Almost all plates fall into one of three groups: thick bone broths, barbecue, gochujang-based braised or stirfried foods with garlic and sesame oil.

Bottom tier:
+2. Japanese:
Ridiculously devoid of variety, islands have very limited produce, herbs, and spices, and they refuse to adapt by importing many foreign cooking products. What they do import, they almost always use hamhandedly (see: "cream" sauce made with milk and badly diluted, ketchup as a sauce for omelets and spaghetti, undersweetened desserts, sandwiches dressed with only shredded cabbage, burgers made predominantly with pork and fillers). National specialties include chicken grilled on a stick with soy sauce and sugar, chicken grilled without a stick with soy sauce and sugar, eel braised in soy sauce and sugar, pork belly braised in soy sauce and sugar, thin-cut beef boiled in soy sauce and sugar, soy sauce and sugar based bbq sauce, uncooked fish.

+1. Hong Kong
Dim sum and siu mei are fantastic, and pretty much nothing else is.

0. Filipino:
Has a few gems, but is plagued by horrible interpretations of foods from other countries like banana ketchup pasta, hot dogs dripping in red dye, canned meats, underwhelming fried foods. It is probably not a coincidence that Filipinas are plagued by obesity, since their modern cuisine is packed with processed and canned foods. Whatever "traditional" foods they have fail to shine, especially compared with the other Malay cuisines.

Honorable mentions:
Indonesian - pretty much Malay food without Chinese influence
Singaporean - more or less Malaysian food

It is possible that some people can enjoy some of China's food while completely hating others. The regional variety is that great. I can understand why an user would separate it.

China is just too big. Even Chinese chefs refer to the country as having five king styles, and these do not even include Hong Kong, Macanese, Taiwanese, or Hainanese food. To call Chinese "one style" would be like calling European cuisine one style as well.

Banana ketchup pasta is great. And I like their hotdogs more than I do other hotdogs, which are abominably salty. So salty, you have to boil them first. And even after you do that, they essentially have the same texture as turkey meatballs: cardboard. Filipino hotdogs are juicier and less cardboard-y than that.
Never had Malay food, so I have no idea if is superior or inferior to Filipino food.
Though mostly living in a Filipino dominated community, I have enjoyed their traditional foods which are mostly soups and stews, I have found. I don't know where you got the packed with processed/canned foods thing from though.
But with my experience with Vietnamese food which goes beyond the sandwiches and noodles, I think they're actually on par with each other, traditional food-wise. Noodles though, Vietnamese have got that advantage for sure.
I think Japanese food is also really great. I think you're just trying to find something from Japanese cuisine that it doesn't have. Just like you did with Korean and Chinese.

>five king styles
First time I've heard of that.
I know you can divide Chinese food into two classifications:
Northern and Southern
8 Great Cuisines of China

>As for the ranking of obesity in the ASEAN region, Thailand came second after Malaysia, with the highest number of people with the disease.
You should eat more pho.

Hot dogs tend to be very salty because the salt treats the meat to help it achieve a certain texture. Perhaps undersalting is part of the reason why Filipino dogs taste so unlike actual hot dogs. The casing is also weird. If you don't like the saltiness of hot dogs, the solution is to switch to other grill sausages like bratwurst and knockwurst, but Filipino hot dogs are a sham imitation that, to me, just tastes and feels awful. Huge let down.

Where I live there is a huge Filipino community, lots of restaurants and shops. The shops are overwhelmed with Wal-Mart foods. The restaurants fare better, I don't mind eating at them but they are kind of unimpressive. Decent barbecue, bitter vegetables and sloppy, underseasoned bean soups. Not really good value for the price, but not horrible. I would not compare it to Vietnamese at all. Flip seasoning is badly unbalanced from my experience, nothing like Viet.

Japanese food is not very great. It does have one advantage: the lack of seasonings and Japanese autism has put a focus on the freshness and quality of the ingredients. So what you get is a good quality cut of meat with minimal seasoning and prep with a limited variety of fresh vegetables. That's why Japanese are content with their food, but also very skinny and basically underfed. I lived in Japan for two years, and eating out was something I pretty much never wanted to do, which is strange because I've loved eating out in every country I've visited or lived in.

You can divide Chinese cuisine into a million classifications. It's the size of 30 European countries.

You know, I'm not sure how it works out, but in my travels and migrant life around Asia I've never seen as many fat people as I've seen in Taiwan's Filipino community.

>underseasoned bean soups
I'm Filipino and I don't know what the fuck that is. We have bean soups? The only bitter vegetable soup I know is pinakbet, and that is something that is an acquired taste for Filipinos because it is very bitter.
I've had Vietnamese beef and tomato stews and they literally taste the same as beef mechado, a Filipino stew.
I am not sure where you ate "Filipino" food at.

in a Flip community restaurant. there was not a single person working or eating there from any country other than the Philippines so I assume it's actual Flip food

Or could it be a just a restaurant in a Filipino community? Because that happens a lot.

what?

Bo Kho is a very good Vietnamese food, but if I were to guess, it might have its equivalents in every SEA country in the same way that the Filipino sinigang is related to the Malay singgang.

Just because a Filipino community restaurant is in a Filipino community, that doesn't mean the food is actually authentic Filipino. In the same way American Chinese is not actually authentic Chinese from Sichuan or Zhejiang. Especially since some of them are expatriate communities, they have to make do with local ingredients.

I suspected as much. Food culture is easily affected by the countries you interact with in the local region.

Chinese immigrants in America sell each other Chinese food.

>there are people in this thread that consider Indian, Middle Eastern, and Persian food as Asian
At least we know that people know their world geography here.

No, they don't. Not all Chinese restaurants have "Chinese" menus. And not all Chinese-Americans even like traditional Chinese food. Some of them don't even know the Chinese food I was talking about.

>Perhaps undersalting is part of the reason why Filipino dogs taste so unlike actual hot dogs. The casing is also weird. If you don't like the saltiness of hot dogs, the solution is to switch to other grill sausages like bratwurst and knockwurst, but Filipino hot dogs are a sham imitation that, to me, just tastes and feels awful.
I've eaten German sausages, and while German sausages have a bit more oomph to them (I love em a lot), I think Filipino hotdogs serve as a sweeter and juicier variety of hotdogs in comparison to hotdogs sold elsewhere.
As a guy who enjoys foreign food, I think we as Americans, can enjoy less salty foods to be quite honest. During 4th of July and Labor Day parades, we do end up boiling our hotdogs to make them less salty so maybe there is something good to what the Filipinos do to their hotdogs.
German sausages > Filipino hotdogs > American hotdogs
But I'm comparing sausages with hotdogs.

They all use rice and are therefore Asian.
In all honesty though Persian has some similarities with Western Chinese food

>during 4th of July and Labor Day parades, we do end up boiling our hotdogs to make them less salty
Where the fuck do you live where that happens? Those are grilling days.

I've been meaning to try some Ziran Yangrou (Western Chinese) which a local restaurant of ours have. I think it might be just like you said, having quite a bit of similarity with Persian food. I remember some Persian women cooking meatball rice soup (Koofteh?) before, and it might taste similar to that.

why are you comparing the food that Filipino expats would sell to Filipino expats to food that Americans sell other Americans and call "Chinese"?

I love foreign foods, but I hate Filipino hot dogs. That's all there is to it.

Xinjiang province is basically Central Asia

Because the idea is the same. I've seen Filipino expat restaurants before and the food is basically what they scrounge up from local ingredients, not really what is cooked in the Philippines.
When I heard underseasoned bean soups and modern cuisine being mostly processed/canned shit, I went full >what
Then I knew you were eating expat food rather than actual Filipino food. Not minding the fact that Thais and Malays are more obese than Filipinos.

Eh, I don't think those are justifications. Rather, I think they're merely personal taste. For example, I enjoy Japanese food far more than SEA foods for their simplicity and trying to bring out the flavor out of the ingredients rather than adding spices to them.
Your justifications seem to be based on "more spices the merrier" + "cuisine must have variety" kind of rankings.

Well obviously. It's the same reason why lamb dishes, dumplings, and noodles are more prevalent in Northern Chinese cooking. Geography generally decides what people eat and how they eat them.

Yeah this is pretty much true. Can confirm as a Korean.

Chinese cuisine is the best. There's just so much variation based on region too that pretty much everyone can enjoy at least one region's part of Chinese food

Yeah. I'm currently trying find restaurants locally to taste all 8 Great Cuisines of China right now.

You can always rely on Korean to be too hot, too sweet, too salty, and too fishy. Yuck!

Watch out for that cumin, man. Like other spiced up foods, they tend to make you stink for a day or two after eating them.

>Middle Eastern that low

motherfucker Afghan food is delish

Afghanistan is in South Asia.

Afghan food is pretty funny.
It's like if Northern Chinese and Northern Indian had a bastard rape baby (which historically Afghanistan is).

luckypeach.com/recipes/afghan-mantu/
>Once the mantu are steamed, arrange the dumplings on the platter in whatever formation you like, though concentric circles are a crowd pleaser. Next, do your best Jackson Pollock impression when adding another thin coating of yogurt atop the dumplings.
>yogurt atop the dumplings

Has anyone had North Asian food before? Or is it simply Russian food in Asia? I know Russian food has some similarities with East Asian foods like dumplings.
That might probably taste good. Maybe.

>i have no idea what i'm talking about, but please take my opinions seriously
Indonesian cuisine lacks Chinese influence?
Taiwanese valued for anything other than dumplings and westernised desserts?
Korean food has three varieties but you mention four?
HK cuisine not full of variety, especially taking into account that it's a single city and not some huge region?
Were you dropped on your head as a child?

He's a fucking troll. Anyone who's been to Singapore and Malaysia before will know that there's a distinguishable difference between their foods.

I don't get the idea of "scrounging up." My country is like 1000km away from the Philippines and has a wide variety of affordable produce, meats, and spices. If you can't make real Flip food here, you must be a shit cook.

I'm not sure if you would call it a bean "soup" persay, but it was definitely some sort of bean slop. The processed/canned shit I don't quite get, but that seems to be what Flips buy here. The stores could include large refrigeration and sell produce if they wanted, but they don't, they have small freezers with ice cream and hot dogs and almost everything else is instant noodles, spam, ripoffs of American snack foods, powdered cooking mix, cuisine products from other SEA countries.

They are definitely markers of the quality of a cuisine. If you can make one dish really well, it does not make you an ace chef. Variety, and being able to make your foods pop while having a variety of flavors, is what separates a simple cuisine from a developed one.

>Indonesian cuisine lacks Chinese influence?
pretty much yeah. Indonesian food is about as Chinese as American food. Malay food, by contrast, often includes Hoklo cuisine. Not Hoklo-influenced, actually Hoklo.

>Taiwanese valued for anything other than dumplings and westernised desserts?
I live in Taiwan, right around the corner from a night market and a block over from a cuisine street, and you're pretty fucking dumb

>Korean food has three varieties but you mention four?
braised or stirfried food with gochujang, garlic, and sesame is one variety

>HK cuisine not full of variety, especially taking into account that it's a single city and not some huge region?
When did I say HK cuisine doesn't have variety?

Were you dropped on your head as a child?

I've been to both. Tbh the food in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur is almost identical, except KL is slightly more Malay and Singapore is slightly more Min.

>They are definitely markers of the quality of a cuisine. If you can make one dish really well, it does not make you an ace chef. Variety, and being able to make your foods pop while having a variety of flavors, is what separates a simple cuisine from a developed one.
That's pretty much bullshit in my honest opinion.
Geography tends to cause the single greatest factor of why cultures develop culinary traditions the way they do.
This is why grading cuisine based on the variety is pretty foolish. Some cooking styles don't work well in some climates, ingredients aren't available in some others, and trade routes weren't all encompassing in a historical sense, which is why food cultures vary a lot in the world.
Simply saying Korean food sucks or Japanese food sucks because it uses this or it uses that or it doesn't use enough of this or that is the sign of ignorance.
Actually, I wouldn't trust anyone who rates food on something like that.

Why is it that their curry taste like sour milk? Can't get that out of my memories.

here's the thing: it's not the fucking 14th century. We already regard tomato sauces as one of the greatest pieces of Italian cuisine even though tomatoes are not even indigenous to Europe. Taiwan's national dish is beef noodle soup, which frequently uses tomato. When do you think Taiwanese started eating fucking tomatoes? Milk tea? It came about like 30 years ago.

I'm not grading a country's cuisine on the basis of what is indigenous to it, I'm grading it on the basis of how they use the ingredients available to them and how many delicious things they can produce whether or not they have lots of ingredients. Thailand has a wide variety of herbs, spices, and produce, yet its actual food variety is not that broad. Meanwhile Korean food is pretty tasty even though Korea is a tiny, frosty mountain country and they approach foreign foods with a good amount of care.

One of the easiest ways for me to rate a country's cuisine is the fried chicken index. Everyone has fried chicken, it seems. Chicken is widely available, and every country has some kind of starch and fat. Japanese fried chicken is shit, Thai fried chicken is underwhelming, Korean fried chicken is delicious. Simple way to figure out if a country is making due with its ingredients or not. This is not a fucking Marxist grading system.

Not even remotely accurate

My favourite Asian cuisine is without a doubt Indian, but if we're only counting slanty eyed Asians then maybe Indonesian or Japanese.

I never said Korean food was devoid or not devoid of variety. The other guy did. You dumbass.
You moron. Just because people manage to get stuff in their cities through trade, that doesn't mean every place in the country manages to get all of it.
Using your grading system, smaller countries that are right next to trading routes will always get a better grade than landlocked nations or bigger countries like China. And even now, not every nation on Earth is able to get any ingredient they want in this global economy.
Hongshao niu rou mian was also based on Sichuan cooking that just got transferred to Taiwan, so it's not like it was only tomatoes that is the basis of the dish.
>fried chicken index
Complete fucking dumbass.

...

How can you get past the strong spices of Indian cuisine? Which foods are not too strong in flavor?

Who are you quoting?

>just because a country has an ingredient doesn't mean the country's cuisine should be judged as though the country has that ingredient
???

>big countries like China
which is why I specifically said China must be considered as many cuisines, not just one. too many factors to judge the cuisine of a country as broad as China. I'm not unfair.

Meanwhile India has a great variety of ingredients yet I ranked it lower than Taiwan, which is a small island filled with mountains. Of course it has the benefit of being tropical.

>Hongshao niu rou mian was also based on Sichuan cooking that just got transferred to Taiwan
>>>Taiwanese cuisine thrives because they know how to handle imported cooking styles
>>>>>>>>>>>
thanks for proving my point dumbass

>complete fucking dumbass
great response

a dumb shit who said I'm a passportless flyover

You sound upset.

Im Living in Seoul and I Can assure You its the worst of all asian cuisines

Most koreans eat at BK / McD / Starbucks etc and thinks its good food

Traditional korean food is great, but not nearly as varied or refined as japanese or chinese

JAP = INDIAN = VIETNAMESE = THAI > CHINESE > PAKI > LAOTIAN = INDONESIAN = MALAYSIAN = CAMBODIAN > FIJI > HAWAIIAN > KOREAN

OFFICIAL POWER RANKINGS

>I'm not unfair.
>considers Chinese cooking middle tier
Right.
>Meanwhile India has a great variety of ingredients yet I ranked it lower than Taiwan, which is a small island filled with mountains.
A small trading island nation that is in a very enviable position to many different styles of cooking and influence around the world.
India is like China in that it is so large, it ends up really having most of what they have in it, and so development of their cooking

>thanks for proving my point
I didn't. You are grading things depending on "variety" and a completely subjective notion on use of spices when that is complete fucking hogwash. The point I made was that under such a grading system, trading nations in busy trading lanes that are small will have more of an advantage than either landlocked nations or big nations like China. And that's just utterly ridiculous and just your personal tastes. Even when French chefs consider Japan as one of the mecca of cuisines in the world, you're in some kind of retardmode nationalism because you think "muh variety" reigns supreme.