Which country should you eat your way through next?
Six quick questions about heat, hunger, budget and season. I score all eleven country guides and show you the best fit, with the dishes to start on. It takes about a minute and nothing is saved.
Built from the guides, not from a template
Every country guide on this site lists the dishes worth ordering with their prices, the daily food budget, and a rating for each month of the year. Taste Match scores all eleven against your answers: how much chilli you can take, what you want to wake up to, what you spend on food, and when you are going.
The dishes, prices, budgets and monthly ratings come straight from the guides, which were checked in September 2026. The heat, street food, city, wild and ease scores are my own read on each country, so treat the result as a good argument for where to start, not a verdict.
The eleven guides
- ThailandFour regions, one of the deepest street-food cultures on earth, and the easiest country in Asia to travel badly.
- MalaysiaThree cuisines that have been arguing productively for two hundred years, and the most underrated eating in Asia.
- SingaporeExpensive to sleep in, absurdly cheap to eat in. A masterclass in hawker food.
- VietnamA thousand miles of coastline and three distinct food cultures.
- LaosThe slowest country in South-East Asia, and the one that punishes a tight itinerary.
- IndonesiaSeventeen thousand islands, and most visitors see one. Java is where the country actually is.
- ChinaEight distinct regional cuisines and the best high-speed rail network on earth.
- JapanThe most rewarding country in the world to eat in. Book early, walk a lot, eat standing up.
- TurkeyOne of the four or five genuinely great food cultures on earth.
- KenyaNyama choma, Swahili coastal cooking and the best-organised safari infrastructure in Africa.
- UgandaHome. The most underrated food country in East Africa.