Profil de Roadto50Cuisines

Road to 50 Cuisines | Food & Travel
How One Unanswered Question Became a 25-Year Journey Through the World's Kitchens


The story of Road to 50 Cuisines is not about food. It is about what food reveals when you take it seriously enough to follow it all the way back to where it comes from.


There is a particular kind of restlessness that comes from knowing you are only seeing the surface of something. You can feel it clearly: the sense that what is visible is real and interesting, but that something much more significant is happening underneath, just out of reach, available only to people who have been willing to go further than a first impression allows. That feeling, experienced for the first time in relation to food about 25 years ago, is what set off the journey that became Road to 50 Cuisines. It has not gone away since. If anything, the deeper the journey goes, the stronger it gets.

The surface, in this case, was a meal. Not a remarkable one by any obvious measure. But something about it stopped the usual forward motion of eating and prompted a question that turned out to be much harder to answer than it looked: why does this taste the way it does? Not in a technical sense. In a human sense. What decisions, made by what people, over what period of time, produced this particular combination of ingredients and techniques and flavours? Who decided this was how it should be done, and how did they know?

"The best question I ever asked about food had nothing to do with how it tasted. It had everything to do with why it existed at all."
The Decision That Changed Everything

Culinary school was the first attempt to answer that question through formal means. And it taught real things. The vocabulary of professional cooking, the discipline of a working kitchen, the technical foundation that allows someone to approach any ingredient with at least a starting point of understanding. These were valuable. But they were also, it became increasingly clear, a very partial answer to a question that kept getting bigger the more it was examined.

The school was teaching technique. The question was about culture. And culture, it turned out, could not be learned from a curriculum. It could only be learned from the people who carried it, in the places where it had developed, through the act of actually cooking alongside them rather than simply studying what they had produced. That recognition, which arrived gradually during training and then with sudden clarity sometime after it ended, redirected everything that came next.

Weekends became research trips. Holidays were redirected toward food traditions that were completely unfamiliar. Any gap in the schedule became an opportunity to find a kitchen somewhere new and ask, through presence and effort and a willingness to be a beginner again, the question that had started all of this: what does this cuisine actually feel like from the inside?

The Education That Formal Training Cannot Give

The first thing those early kitchens taught was humility. Arriving with formal training and genuine enthusiasm, it took very little time in each new kitchen to understand how much of the real knowledge was invisible from the outside. The local cooks I worked alongside had not learned their craft from books or schools. They had learned it from the people who came before them, in the same kitchen, making the same dishes, adjusting the same details based on the same instincts that had been passed down through generations of doing it this way because this way worked.

That kind of knowledge does not transfer through explanation. It transfers through watching, through doing, through making mistakes and having them corrected without fanfare by someone who has made and corrected the same mistakes themselves. The most valuable lessons I have ever received about cooking have come in the form of a hand reaching over to adjust something I was doing wrong, or a quiet demonstration of a technique that no recipe has ever managed to describe adequately, or a look that communicated, without any words at all, that what I had just produced was not quite right and that I should pay closer attention to what came next.

What the Count Actually Means

The original number was 50. It gave the pursuit a shape when shape was needed, a concrete destination that made the whole endeavour feel like something with a direction rather than an open-ended wandering. And it served that purpose well. But somewhere along the way, the relationship with the number changed in a way that was difficult to predict at the start.

The count is now close to 100. And what that number represents, honestly, is not achievement but accumulation. Not a destination reached but a body of experience that keeps revealing new things the more of it there is. Each cuisine explored seriously has made the next one richer. The connections between food traditions, the shared solutions to shared problems, the ways that geography and history and trade have moved ingredients and techniques across borders and centuries, these patterns only become visible after enough individual data points have been gathered. The number is the minimum required to start seeing the picture.

"At 50 cuisines you have a collection. At 100 you start to see a map. The map is what this has always really been about."
From Private Pursuit to Shared Journey

For most of those 25 years, everything accumulated privately. The experiences, the lessons, the slow building of a way of seeing food and culture that changed how the world looked, all of it stayed internal. Shared occasionally in conversation, documented in personal notes, but never offered publicly. The reason was simple: it did not feel finished. There was always more to learn, always another cuisine that would add something essential to the understanding, always a reason to wait a little longer before trying to share what the journey had produced so far.

The reason to stop waiting came from the recognition that finished was never going to arrive. The journey is not the kind that ends with a conclusion. It is the kind that keeps generating new material indefinitely, and waiting for it to be complete before sharing anything meant waiting forever. The stories from 25 years of cooking in other people's kitchens were too good and too real and too useful to people who cared about food and culture to remain private any longer.

That is the origin of Road to 50 Cuisines. Not a brand or a project conceived in advance, but a decision to share what had been building for a quarter century with anyone curious enough to want it. Each week, a new cuisine receives the kind of attention it deserves. Not a surface overview, not a checklist of famous dishes, but a genuine attempt to understand what makes that food tradition what it is, who the people behind it are, and what cooking and eating it can teach someone who comes to it with real openness.

What Comes Next

The question that started this journey 25 years ago has not been fully answered. It probably never will be. But the pursuit of it, conducted through nearly 100 cuisines across the world, has produced something more valuable than an answer: a way of engaging with food and culture that keeps finding new things to see no matter how much has already been seen.

If you have spent time genuinely exploring 50 cuisines yourself, you already understand the pull of this kind of curiosity. And if you are just beginning to feel it, there has never been a better moment to follow where it leads. The kitchens are open. The people are generous. And 25 years in, the journey has never once found a reason to stop.