I think the Italians beat the French for food overall, just because, as
@goodNumber10 says, the quality of their food is high on every level. The French might rule the Michelin starred places, but most of us go to one of those maybe a few times in a lifetime. What makes Italian great is the delicious, fresh, perfectly-balanced €2 caprese salad you get in a crappy little trattoria in a crappy little town. They can be pretty boring and parochial about their food, but they do do it well. It just permeates their culture so deeply, you feel like it's like a mark of shame to serve a bad dish - what struck me, is how good a meal you can buy in the really touristy parts of Rome. Every major tourist city in the world, you know if you go for a meal in the middle of the tourist zone in tourist season you'll pay too much for bad food, except Rome - it's overpriced, but the quality doesn't drop.
Objective innit m9?!! I love French and Italian, not so keen on Asian. Portuguese is my favourite.
Portugues, not a standard call for "best cuisine", but yeah, I get it, a bit underrated. Largely fish/seafood and very meaty stews in my experience? You'd love where I live, it's basically Little Portugal in London, I've been eating pasteles de nata, those little custard tarts, pretty much daily recently. Actually, I might pop down and have another one now ...
I think the Spanish are unfairly overlooked in the discussions of great cuisines. Suffers slightly from having a lot of tourist traps serving mediocre tapas, but any half-decent tapas bar will have two or three superb options and a few good ones.
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One of my favourite dishes is spaghetti with lardon (done in olive oil in the oven) just all mixed together... no sauce, just plain boiled spaghetti and then oil and lardons added after and mixed all in the one pot.
Sounds ridiculous but it's amazing.
That just sounds like it needs pepper ...
