Land each item in the right country — the exact spot inside it doesn't matter.
Rules & what counts
National Dishes Map Quiz — Rules & What Counts
Everyone can name a national dish. Fewer people can put twenty of them on a map. This quiz deals you photographs of twenty famous dishes and asks you to drag each one onto the country it comes from.
The names are printed on the cards, so nothing is hidden — this is a geography test wearing a chef's apron. The easy half places itself: pizza, sushi, tacos. The other half is where runs are lost, because a dish you have eaten is not the same as a dish you can find. Rendang, doro wat and bibimbap all have exact homes, and they are not next to each other.
Each ring sits on the city or region the dish actually comes from rather than the capital, so a finished board reads as a food map: Naples, Valencia, Jeonju, Quebec, Padang.
How to play
Drag each dish card from the tray onto one of the dashed rings on the world map.
Drops are forgiving. A card snaps to the nearest ring within a generous radius, and a sloppy drop fills an empty ring instead of pushing out a card you already placed.
Nothing is graded while you place. Rearrange as much as you like, then press Confirm to score all twenty at once.
The timer counts up from zero, so a fast, confident run climbs the leaderboard.
Give Up grades what you have placed and reveals where every dish belongs.
What counts in this quiz
Twenty dishes from twenty different countries — no country appears twice, so every card has exactly one ring that is right.
Scoring is by country. The ring is drawn at the dish's home city, but the country is what counts.
Only dishes with one undisputed home country are used. That is the whole selection rule.
Every photo is a freely licensed Wikimedia Commons image of the dish as it is actually served.
The spread is deliberate: six from Europe, seven from Asia, four from the Americas, two from Africa and one from Oceania.
What's not included — and why
Dishes that more than one country claims are left out. Hummus, falafel and shakshuka are argued over across the eastern Mediterranean, couscous belongs to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia together, and the hamburger's origin is disputed inside the United States, let alone outside it.
A quiz that marks a national argument as "wrong" is a bad quiz, so those dishes have no card at all rather than an arbitrary one.
Dishes that have travelled so far that the origin is no longer the point — the kebab, the curry, the spring roll — are also out.
Single ingredients are not dishes. Cheese, olive oil and rice name a place, but they are not something served on a plate.
Good to know
Pizza margherita is said to have been made for Queen Margherita of Savoy in 1889, in the colours of the Italian flag: red tomato, white mozzarella, green basil. Naples' pizza-making is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list.
Rendang is cooked until the coconut liquid has completely evaporated and the meat fries in its own oil — which is why it keeps for weeks without a fridge, and why it was invented by a travelling people.
Doro wat is served on injera, a sourdough flatbread of teff that doubles as the plate and the cutlery.
Poutine appeared in rural Quebec in the late 1950s. Several villages still claim to be its birthplace, but all of them are in Quebec — which is why the dish is here and the hamburger is not.
Ceviche is so central to Peru that the country has a national holiday for it, on 28 June.
Borscht was added to the UNESCO list of intangible heritage in need of urgent safeguarding in 2022, as Ukrainian culinary culture.
The Australian meat pie is eaten at the football by the hundred thousand, and it is a national convention that the tomato sauce goes on top rather than inside.