Curated playlist
Street food
- FalafelFalafel once had a place on the breakfast menu at McDonald's in Egypt, where the chain for a time sold a sandwich called the McFalafel. A global burger company adapting its menu around a fried bean fritter says a great deal about how…
- TacoIn 2024, El Califa de León in Mexico City became the first taco stand to win a Michelin star. The taco itself is a small, hand-sized tortilla made of corn or wheat. A filling goes on top, the tortilla folds around it, and the whole thing…
- TamaleA red light burning outside a home in Guatemala at night signals that tamales are for sale inside. The tamale itself is a parcel of corn dough and filling with roots thousands of years deep. Today it appears in Andean valleys, Caribbean…
- Doner kebabDoner kebab, a Turkish dish of seasoned meat roasted on a vertical spit, supported more than 16,000 establishments in Germany in 2011. Together they brought in yearly sales of €3.5 billion. That is a remarkable record for a meal that began…
- KebabKebab is not one dish. In the Syrian city of Aleppo alone, cooks are said to make at least twenty-six versions of it. Some are cooked with cherries, some with aubergine, some with chili, parsley and pine nuts, and one style is made with…
- Dim sumDim sum, written in Cantonese pronunciation, translates literally as "touch the heart." It is the name for a huge family of small Chinese dishes, traditionally eaten at brunch in restaurants with a pot of tea close at hand. Most of the…
- ShawarmaShawarma begins with a tall cone of stacked meat turning slowly beside a source of heat. As the outer layer cooks, a cook shaves it away in thin pieces, and the cone keeps turning. That simple routine plays out at street stalls across the…
- PirozhkiJapan's curry bread is said to have been inspired by pirozhki. Russian refugees brought the pastry there in 1917.
- PilafPilaf, also written pilav, pilau or plov, is judged by one old test: does each grain stand apart from the next? Thirteenth-century texts set the bar plainly. The grains should be plump and slightly firm, like peppercorns, with no mush and…
- PoutinePoutine, a heap of french fries and cheese curds under hot brown gravy, may owe its name to a shouted complaint in 1957. In the Quebec town of Warwick, a regular customer asked café owner Fernand Lachance to drop a handful of cheese curds…
- BagelThe bagel first appears in writing in 1610, in the Community Regulations of Kraków, Poland. That rule book lists it as a gift for women in childbirth. The linguist Leo Rosten points to this entry in his book The Joys of Yiddish, as the…