Street Food of the World Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which country treats mohinga, a soup of rice vermicelli in a thick, lemongrass-scented broth thickened with toasted chickpea flour and made from catfish or other freshwater fish, as its national dish, eaten most often at breakfast from a vendor carrying the pot and stove on a shoulder pole?

Question 2

Which country's suya is thin strips of beef, offal or chicken threaded onto sticks, coated in a dry, spicy, nutty rub of ground peanuts, chilli and spices called yaji, and grilled over an open fire, then served with more of the rub, sliced onion and tomato in newspaper?

Question 3

Which country treats the chivito as a national dish, a tall sandwich in a soft bun built on a thin slice of grilled beef with ham, melted cheese, bacon, a fried egg, lettuce, tomato and olives, usually served with a heap of chips?

Question 4

Which country's banh xeo is a large, thin, turmeric-yellow rice-flour crepe made shatteringly crisp with coconut milk, folded like an omelette over pork, shrimp and bean sprouts, then torn up, wrapped in lettuce and herbs and dipped in a sweet fish sauce?

Question 5

Which country's simit, a ring of bread encrusted with toasted sesame seeds, crisp outside and chewy within, is sold from glass carts and from trays balanced on the head on nearly every busy street, eaten plain or with cheese, olives and tea for breakfast?

Question 6

Which country's gimbap rolls seasoned rice and strips of egg, pickled radish, spinach, carrot and often ham or bulgogi in a sheet of dried seaweed, slices it into rounds and packs it for picnics, school trips and quick lunches from dedicated cheap roll shops?

Question 7

Which country's hawawshi packs spiced minced meat with onion, chilli and parsley inside a pocket of local flatbread, then bakes or grills it until the bread crisps and chars and the fat soaks in, sold sizzling from butcher-run shops and carts?

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About Street Food of the World

Street food is where a country cooks in public. It is cheaper, faster and more honest than restaurant food, invented by and for people who work with their hands, sold from a cart, a hatch, a boat or a brazier on the pavement, and eaten standing up. This quiz visits about eighty of these snacks, from the sizzling-plate pig's-head sisig of Pampanga to the fish sandwiches handed up from bobbing boats beside a bridge in Istanbul.

Every question works the same way. A street dish is described, by its ingredients, how it is cooked and sold, and the scene around the stall, and you pick the country it comes from out of four options. The explanation then gives where in that country it started, often a single city or even a single vendor, how it is really eaten, and the migration or the hard time that produced it.

The quiz leans Asian, and honestly so: the continent's cart-and-hawker culture, from the night markets of Taiwan and the pushcarts of Java to the pavement grills of Xinjiang and the breakfast noodle pots of Yangon, is the densest and most varied on Earth. But it also travels through the Levant and the Caucasus, central Europe's fried-dough belt, the sausage stands of the German-speaking world, the beach shacks of the Caribbean and West Africa's dusk-lit suya grills.

A pattern runs through almost all of it: street food is the food of movement and of making do. It carries the marks of the people who arrived hungry and cooked what they could. Chinese migrants left noodle soups from Cambodia to Peru. Indian workers barred from restaurants under segregation hollowed out a loaf for their curry in Durban. Post-war shortages gave Japan its cabbage pancakes, Poland its cheese-and-ketchup baguette, and Berlin its curry sausage from British army rations. Enslaved cooks given the offal cuts turned beef hearts into Peru's anticuchos.

Many of these snacks are shared or fought over, and the answers say so: satay, the papaya-salad, nasi lemak, roti canai, kaya toast, the Balkan grilled patties, the choripan and the meat pie all cross borders and start arguments. Where a photograph of the food would not simply hand the answer to someone who already knows it, it is shown with the question; the most globally recognised items are left as text so the picture is not a giveaway.

A street-food quiz sticks because each answer is something you could actually buy tonight, from a real person at a real cart, for the price of a coffee. Learn that a Xi'an pork sandwich may be two thousand years old, that Vietnamese bun cha was eaten by a US president on a plastic stool, and that Filipino vendors call balut through the streets after dark, and the map turns into a set of directions. Every claim has been checked against reliable sources, and the wording is kept plain.