I agree with the OP that a lot of American food is overlooked/dismissed, but man some of that stuff costs $$$. For the average working person (more like nonworking person) over there it’s McDonald’s, Taco Bell and whatever else.
British food. IMO, the only relatively consistently good food in London seems to be Indian. In Paris, for cheap food, bakeries are everywhere and almost always pretty solid.
This site seems to be an outlier in its negative feelings about the Taiwanese food scene. It gets lots of great press, and almost everyone I know that’s been there to visit loves it. I’ve had non taiwanese friends arrange a long stop over on the way back from Thailand and the Philippines to check out the food scene.
British food itself is bad (though occasional English breakfast isn’t bad as long as I never have to touch the beans), but London is extremely multicultural so there’s a lot of different kinds of cuisines available.
Bakeries are good and all but would you have just bread for every meal? I wouldn’t.
Gua Bao is a big thing in London
Bubble tea doesn’t need to be said.
All through Asia and Chinese speaking world, Taiwanese good held in good regard.
It’s an interesting food culture with a lot of great stuff.
By the way, BD, in reply to your question about food in Bologna. It was just great but of course Italian and not very international, so perfect, but just for a few days. Two dishes that come to mind, one was a carbonara but with a twist of red peppercorns, which gave it a real zing, plus a dessert of ice cream with would you believe, balsamic vinegar, drizzled over it.
Actually while I was there, I went on a food tour, and we were taken around a Parmesan “factory”, Balsamic vinegar “distillery?!” My wife insisted on buying the best balsamic vinegar on sale! 85 Euro for 100ml! I was not happy, but have thanked her each time we use it. The flavor is out of this world, and it’s got a really thick consistency, almost gooey, and you only need a few drops of it on say a Caprese salad. There’s still about 15ml left, not bad since we visited in the summer of 2019.
I would say food we have at home is nice and produce/supermarket are world class but general eating out in the UK is pretty shit at lower levels. London is the exception, as is excellent Indian and Turkish food everywhere. Pub food in UK can be abysmal
I also went there when it opened in London. Not only was the queue ridiculously long, the food portions were like 1/3 of DTF in Taiwan and everything was 2-3 times more expensive. I was not amused.
Bubble tea from Taiwan is a massive global phenomenon now. If I recall correctly there are bubble tea companies pulling in over a billion USD in revenue !
That could be more than the entire loose leaf tea industry in Taiwan (I know a bit about tea ).
You have growth rates in SE Asia of 3000%. Interestingly almost all the chains are still Taiwanese.