The Cuisine You'd Eat Every Day for the Rest of Your Life

Ask what someone's favourite cuisine is and the answer usually arrives before they have finished hearing the question. Ask them to defend it against a second one and it takes considerably longer.

Everything here had to be a cuisine people name by its country. If cities in the English-speaking world have restaurants trading under that nationality, it is in. That is the whole rule, applied once, before any of the fifty were written down.

It throws out the regional labels that would otherwise swallow the list, so there is no Sichuan sitting next to China and no Tex-Mex next to Mexico. It also puts Salvadoran and Ghanaian in the same bracket as France, which is the point rather than an accident.

Fifty survive it. They go head to head until one is left, and the pairings are random, so Italy can meet Japan in the first round and one of them leaves immediately.

The cuisines with one unarguable dish should travel further than the broad ones. Nobody has to stop and think about what Ethiopian or Jamaican tastes like, while Chinese and Indian are large enough that choosing them means choosing nothing in particular, and that hesitation costs rounds.