Worst Rated Dishes in the World

https://www.tasteatlas.com/100-worst-rated-dishes-in-the-world

by imartin2k • 3 years ago

65 92 3 years ago

tasteatlas.com

guntherhermann• 3 years ago

by whom?

Spotted Dick worse than pickled pig's tongue? I'm not having it.

Edit: It looks like this is a crowdsourced food encyclopedia.

Peladillas being rated as the 80th worst food item in the list is baffling. They're nice! They're also rated worse than a duck fetus.

gwill2• 3 years ago

i'm surprised that Balut wasn't number one and that a Canadian layered pizza was in the top 5. obviously "authenticity" played into a lot of the ratings.

_whiteCaps_• 3 years ago

I'm Canadian, and I've never heard of pizza cake before. It was a one time thing by a chain restaurant? Doesn't really fit in the same category as lutefisk.

gwill2• 3 years ago

haven't heard of it either. by the picture i thought it was chicago style deep dish at first and thought that fitting as there is a lot of gatekeeping around it. also that looks a lot more appetizing than Altoona-hotel pizza.

technothrasher2• 3 years ago

It was apparently a Boston Pizza thing. Not hanging out that much in Canada, I'd never heard of Boston Pizza until recently. But it was obvious immediately that 1) While Boston Pizza seems to be based on Greek style pizza from my native New England, it has drifted enough that it's not really that similar, and 2) People generally find Boston Pizza to be poor based on the reviews.

account424• 3 years ago

The "Pizza Cake" looks like what someone who heard of deep dish pizza without actually knowing how its made might cook up. Somewhat unorthodox, perhaps even "stupid food" but I don't see why the end result wouldn't be tasty to most people who like pizza. How it made it to #3 is baffling.

The author/raters also seem to have something against anis, wtf.

joering2• 3 years ago

Some of the worst sounding dishes taste the best. Take something I tried in Poland. It was called "flaczki", which you can translate into "guts". First they told me to try it. It was the most delicious thing I ever ate! It was soft and tasted somewhat like chicken but had much more flavor. Then they told me what it is - its a cow's stomach cooked for at least 12 hours. Glad I am one of those people that the name or knowing what something is made of is not turning me away from eating it.

Seriously if you ever visit Poland try flaczki, but also try kalabki.

Avshalom3• 3 years ago

In english we call that tripe. Not very common in US cuisine. Menudo (hominy, tripe, red chile, broth) is probably the most common dish in the US (though it's generally considered mexican food). I think it --and offal dishes in general-- is more common in UK cuisine though.

legitster• 3 years ago

This is a fun list, but obviously far from objective. Like a lot of online reviews, it seems these are victims to negativity bias - the only people bothering to write reviews are the people who hate this dish.

I am disappointed how few comments were left with the reviews. For some of these dishes I would really like to understand where the hate comes from (grandma always made us eat it vs I'm a tourist and this is weird). Or, conversely, what the appeal is.

LesZedCB• 3 years ago

i've eaten the turkish version kokorec as street food in istiklal. it was served in bread with a bunch of spices. only tried it one but i thought it was good.

yladiz2• 3 years ago

How the hell does number 73, a pastry with nothing suspect, make it on this list? And rated worse than 87, a fried and dried fish. Not that I don’t like dried and fried fish but fried dough being worse? You’re out of your mind.

Also where is surstromming? It’s a food and it doesn’t even appear on the list…?

IanCal• 3 years ago

The seventh worst is literally just beef mince with herbs and leeks/onions.

The main takeaway is that the ratings don't mean much objectively.

notinfuriated• 3 years ago

I suspect the ratings are partly based on expectations. Eating a duck fetus doesn't mess with someone's expectations nearly as much as getting "vegetable roll" and it's really a hunk of beef.

But I'm not sure how they actually rated these. Does seem silly, but a fun list to see some foods I've never heard of before.

oboes2• 3 years ago

There is a lot of innocent or even bland things on this list.

Chikwanga is #44 on the list. This is just a cassava flour cake, it's a staple food meant to be eaten along with something else, it being bland is kind of the point. Of course if you go to some Congolese restaurant and only order chikwanga you're going to be disappointed, but it's the same as going to a Chinese restaurant and only ordering white rice.

SeanLuke2• 3 years ago

Tasteatlas apparently has never heard of ChauDaufu (Stinky Tofu), a common street hawker dish in southern China, notably Hong Kong. This dish involves marinating tofu in, as one cartoon put it long ago, an extract from the unwashed socks of six soccer teams, then deep frying it. The smell is very close to pig manure. It is so potent that a great many apartments have contracts forbidding it from from being brought into the building. It is hard to overstate how bad it smells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu

yladiz2• 3 years ago

I would say it smells more like hot garbage than manure. But point taken, how is it missing from the list?! It’s surely more “worse” or unappetizing than most of first 50?

pigsty• 3 years ago

And it tastes incredible with flavors varying from being similar to a pungent blue cheese to a mild and slightly meaty flavor. I’ve found Hunanese tofu to be the mildest despite looking the scariest (it’s completely black tofu), and Taiwanese smells like a literal garbage bag left to ferment in the hot summer sun and the juices burst in your mouth with every bite. Absolutely exquisite.

It’s the cheese of the Sinosphere in taste, variety, and smell. Every town has its own style and there’s always one that tastes delicious even if the others are disgusting.

Dowwie• 3 years ago

Is this like Korean dead body soup?

basch2• 3 years ago

Part of "the worst rated" (emphasis on rated) means the absence of unrated dishes. Ergo, it is the least popular of dishes popular enough to have been rated in the first place.

account424• 3 years ago

Except stinky tofu is popular enough in China and Taiwan - at least among some people. It's not really some weird speciality from one smal town that most would never have heard off. Any decent food tourism guide will at least mention it.

isatty• 3 years ago

I've had this in various places in China and I've never had it smell/taste as bad as how you describe it. The hostess was even advising me against getting it but it was meh.

archarios• 3 years ago

I tried this a few years ago at a place in Oakland CA called Spices 3! It was horrid smelling. I didn't know what to expect but I HAD to try "stinky tofu". I gave it the old college try but only ate a few bites. The taste was not bad but I could NOT get over the smell. It was extremely overpowering. I had them take it away at one point.

gweinberg2• 3 years ago

I've been to spices 3 many a time, tried some interesting dishes, but never went for the stinky tofu. I did try a spicy intestines appetizer. They should warn you it is served cold. The one dish I really want to try is something called "gangster casserole murder style", but it's some giant thing that I think needs to be shared by at least 4 people, and I haven't been able to find people willing to go in with me on it. It's got blood in it.

system16• 3 years ago

It's hard to find the real chou doufu in major cities these days. Even the stuff in most night markets is toned down so as not to scare off tourists and piss off the other vendors.

I remember the first time I encountered it was in 2000 outside Shenzhen, China (which was mostly a construction site at the time). I literally thought a sewer main had broken.

legerdemain4• 3 years ago

Erm, what? Stinky tofu is just a fermented tofu. Yes, it has a strong smell, but surely you've had fermented or pickled food before? Like, maybe sauerkraut or kimchi? Does a kimchi pickling jar smell any better? It's not some kind of mythological horror food, it's a common and reasonable dish that many normal people enjoy. I've had it as a cold appetizer and as a deep-fried hot appetizer. It's fine both ways.

SeanLuke2• 3 years ago

Um. No.

Stinky Tofu's smell is so distinct, so awful, and so powerful, it is the subject of numerous scientific studies on that topic alone. Wikipedia notes that "The main volatile compound was indole, which has an intense fecal odor".

For example, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6268145/

This is nothing like sauerkraut. German towns don't have rules forbidding people from bringing sauerkraut into buildings.

account424• 3 years ago

Sauerkraut and Kimchi (at least the finished product) don't smell bad at all. Stinky tofu does.

hnfong3• 3 years ago

If you didn't smell the stink two blocks away from the stall you didn't have authentic stinky toufu.

As I mentioned in another comment, I suspect neighbors complaining made it evolve into some milder forms.

Even in its mildest form, it's still a much more distinct smell than fermented veggies.

whermans• 3 years ago

That stink has been etched into my mind ever since a night ten years ago when I spent an hour waiting for someone at a Shanghai subway station that was within wafting distance of a stinky tofu stand. I still have no idea how that stall owner avoided getting lynched by half the commuters that had to pass through his cloud of putrid miasma.

hnfong3• 3 years ago

It's not as common in Hong Kong nowadays. Perhaps due to complaints by neighbors (remember this is a super dense city), in recent years it's hard to find stinky toufu, and even if I find any at all, they don't stink as much as they used to.

Some decades ago the stink spread far and wide, multiple blocks at least. It was a great way to advertise when you didn't have internet advertisement. There are probably regional differences as well, the ones I recall having in Taiwan don't stink as much either, probably due to the same reasons.

It's worth a try if you come across them. They actually just taste like normal fried toufu.

ElfinTrousers2• 3 years ago

I like to think I'm an adventurous eater. Like many people who like to think that, I've tried stinky tofu exactly once.

zwieback3• 3 years ago

Can't believe blood and tongue sausage is on this list!! I eat mass quantities of this when I visit my German homeland. There's a lot of good craft meat here in the pacific northwest but blood sausage and actual Weisswurst is still hard to find.

danem• 3 years ago

Korean blood sausage is also delicious. If you're ever in Korea try to find a good Sundae[0] place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundae_(sausage)

zwieback3• 3 years ago

Thanks for reminding me. There's a place in the Portland area that supposedly serves a good version, will check it out.

oboes2• 3 years ago

Offal-based dishes seem to be frequent on this list. Could it be some US or Anglo-Saxon prejudice against offal? Tongue, liver, tripe, etc are common in many regional European cuisines (not to mention Asian ones).

Avshalom3• 3 years ago

I've never seen any good writing on the subject but I've always found it curious that the US has sort of an arms length relationship with so many meats and almost complete rejection of offal (some liver and tongue and very rarely kidney or gizzard being the exceptions) as compared to, what seems like, the entire rest of the world.

pwillia7• 3 years ago

#92: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf-bsT5mLYs

reducesuffering• 3 years ago

Fried spider (can only eat the legs, too awful to eat the rest) should immediately be #1, not #4.

geomark2• 3 years ago

Thai people are up in arms that one of their favorite dishes, Kaeng som, is #10.

bakoo• 3 years ago

As gaeng som is the favourite dish of both my wife and most of my southern thai inlaws, I've tried getting used to it about once a year for the past 16 years. Tastes better than it smells, but I still don't like it, only manage a tiny portion to be polite - and bring some fun to the table ;)

Durian, however, tasted ok from day one, and great after a couple of years.

djur4• 3 years ago

What is it that you don't like about it?

geomark2• 3 years ago

I hate the smell, always have. Smells like rotten vegetables. But I have grown to like the taste, especially with khai jiaow cha-om (ไข่เจียวชะอม) (acacia shoots fried with egg, a sort of omelette).

cuteboy192• 3 years ago

Jackfruit carving is a family affair. You need your entire clan to pitch in to conquer the little demon-fruit. Even after anointing each member you will always end up with sticky hands that will only become clean after the a few weeks. The taste is pretty great though

djur4• 3 years ago

Apparently substantially worse than kalakukko, a Finnish fish-and-rye Hot Pocket. Which I'm sure has its charms!

codpiece• 3 years ago

I quite liked the skyrhákarl in very small doses. When we entered the fish shop we thought they were closed and cleaning the floors, the ammonia scent was so strong.

Eating it, it had a spritz and fizz like PopRocks. Impossible to describe, but it made me want to go back for a few more pieces before I felt ill.

My daughter never got the scent out of her parka.

jrussino• 3 years ago

This comment thread: "That one from my culinary tradition isn't so bad, wtf? But yeah the rest of these sound gross..."

throwayyy479087• 3 years ago

??? I see a lot of people praising non western stuff like Stinky Tofu

moolcool• 3 years ago

This stuff all looks yummy

technothrasher2• 3 years ago

Even Hákarl? I'm a pretty adventurous eater and the worst you'll usually get out of me is, "Meh, not that great". But Hákarl made me want to throw up, literally. The hardest part of trying to eat it was that it was tripping my gag reflex before I even got it in my mouth. The smell of rotting fish is bad enough. But overlaid with a strong ammonia smell, it just pushes it over the top.

BoiledCabbage• 3 years ago

It's hard to take this list seriously. The 99th worst rated dish consists of the following:

Peppers, onions and garlic mixed with a bit of herbs tomato sauce and olive oil. Then added to a chicken stock to make a soup. Add rice and some meat.

Under what world is that terrible?? It feels like a stable of 20 different cultures around the world. Almost so straightforward it's hard to imagine anyway it can go wrong (other than flat out burning your ingredients).

I'm pretty sure Campbells and Progresso probably both serve a soup of these exact ingredients in a similar ratio.

It's kinda hard to take the rest of this list seriously.

noahtallen• 3 years ago

It’s the worst rated dishes, not the absolute worst. (Though the top ten look pretty terrible.) The fish you mention is rated 2.8 out of 5. It looks like users of the site rate foods.

Rimintil• 3 years ago

Pizza doesn't look terrible. I can't imagine it tastes vastly different from any other type of pizza with the same ingredients.

SamBam3• 3 years ago

(Though the top ten look pretty terrible.)

The Gule Ærter (#6, pea soup) looked positively tasty, so I can't imagine what is hidden in it to make it so bad. I'd have no problem with the Vegetable Roll (#7) and would be happy to try the Sour Spicy Fish Curry (#10, Kaeng som). I like anise-flavored candy, so Anis de Flavigny (#5) is fine.

The pizzas (#8, #3) look like gut-bombs, but I'm sure a slice would be ok. I'm not a fan of kidneys, but I once ordered a whole platefull of them in Paris by mistake, (6 lamb's kidneys, I think) and ate almost the whole lot (Devilled Kidneys, #9).

I think I could taste the spider's legs at least once (#4) and I find it hard to believe that the whitefish salad (Indigirka Salad, #2) could be that bad from it's description...

That leaves only Hákarl (#1) as the one I'm genuinely afraid of.

happymellon• 3 years ago

Indeed. 87 is small fried fish, a type of food that is eaten all over the world. We call it whitebait and I believe it's the same in former Commonwealth countries.

The kicker for me was vegetable roll (just a sausage patty) is only a couple spots away from fried tarantulas.

ElfinTrousers2• 3 years ago

Rated high up there is a dish called "scouse" which sounds like a perfectly unobjectionable stew of meat, potatoes, and vegetables. Nothing fancy, but sounds like it'd be great on a cold wet night.

arp242• 3 years ago

I was expecting a list full of acquired taste dishes or other odd stuff. There's some of that (fried spiders, wtf?!) but most of it just seems like ... normal food? e.g. #7 just seems like a confusingly named beef patty? Why is that #7?

traes• 3 years ago

The only thing I can think of is people searching for literal vegetable rolls being annoyed by the irrelevant result and leaving it a 1 star review as an act of petty revenge. I was wondering if the photo wasn't doing it justice so I looked it up and it really does just seem to be a pretty normal sausage. I would also caution against taking this list too seriously: the top review for the fried spiders is a 5 star review that reads "woops forgot to fry them"

fmajid• 3 years ago

Really strange list. The No. 5 is Anis de Flavigny, a very nice French aniseed candy my wife and her family absolutely adores.

djur4• 3 years ago

A lot of people hate anise flavor. But I kind of doubt that this specific candy would rate the worst. Part of the problem here is that the items on the list have to be things that are considered specialties worth ranking. Nobody's going to be rating a stale box of Good and Plenty on a list like this, even if it is objectively worse than your French candy.

pancrufty• 3 years ago

This looks more like a list of food I’d like to try (or have tried) rather than worst.

I bet that the battered and deep-friend hamburgers I saw in Malaysia beat everything on this list.

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 years ago

No Lutefisk?

No Haggis?

SamBam3• 3 years ago

Lutefisk is #48.

Haggis is delicious.

McSwag• 3 years ago

No Surströmming?

b215826• 3 years ago

This list doesn't make any sense. At #6 is a Danish split pea soup, which looks similar to a lentil soup. And at #4 we have fried spiders.

paraxion• 3 years ago

Because it's presented without any explanation to the rating system, my instinct is that some of them are rated for the traditional "cultural shock" reasons or "more offal than I'm used to" reasons, but some of them seem to be rated low due to "difficult to recreate to an appropriate standard", or just "literally impossible"?

I mean, it could just be "rated by visitors to tasteatlas.com" and it's not weighted by number of votes...

an_aparallel• 3 years ago

enough internet for today everyone! This reminds me of top rapper lists, always wrong, always horrible, always obvious choices... this is probably chatGPT already being put to work :(

cuteboy192• 3 years ago

The article seems to have taken a political stance on North Macedonia's name. very interesting

rospaya• 3 years ago

Greece and Macedonia reached an agreement in 2019, it's North Macedonia now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_naming_dispute

SamBam3• 3 years ago

Hard to take it seriously when it describes many of these "worst" dishes as

* "a popular Italian springtime dish"

* "popular throughout South America"

* "considered to be the nation’s favorite"

* "a popular dish throughout the country"

* "Florence's favorite street food"

etc etc

gweinberg2• 3 years ago

Yeah, about 3/4 of them seem like things I'd be willing to try, not on a dare or anything but just because they sound tasty. Then again, to each his own. I was eating with my brothers once, and the middle brother was saying "You have to try this stuff, it's great. It's Limburger cheese, 6 months past the expiration date". The youngest brother was unimpressed, he said "this tastes just like the Limburger that is only one month past the expiration date that I normally eat." As the boring old brother, I enjoyed it but didn't try to rank it.

account424• 3 years ago

Does Limbuger even get significantly more pungent when you age it more? At least when kept in the fridge it just seems to dry out.

derbOac• 3 years ago

Also some of the dishes are factually incorrect (Number 40 is factually incorrect). This almost seems like something a bot put together.

Actually looking at it now, does this website just have articles about dishes, and these are the entries that are lowest rated? Maybe people are just trolling the website or disagreeing with something about the description?

PurpleRamen• 3 years ago

Taste is not neccessarily a reason for popularity. Often a dish is popular because it's cheap, or simple. And this site probably only contains dishes which are popular enough to be put on this site. So there already is a selection bias. This list is just about the worst dishes from the best dishes (of this site).

senectus1• 3 years ago

this reviewer has no soul.

Deviled Kidneys in the top 10 of worst?!?

That is my favorite breakfast ever. I Lament every day I cant have it.

IvyMike• 3 years ago

I've eaten many of the dishes on this list, including their #1 (hákarl), but none of the things on this list compare to the worst thing I've ever eaten: mopane worm.

https://lodges.safari.co.za/African_Travel_Articles-travel/m...

When I bit down into my first mopane worm, the flavor made me realize two things immediately: A) It tastes exactly how it looks, which is like a fried caterpillar, and B) That terrible apple I once ate as a child actually contained a caterpillar, and that is how I knew the flavor. Ugh.

But forget the taste. The real focus of your attention will be on the textures: The chitinous shell reminiscent of finger nail clippings, the spongy "meat", and the gritty intestinal tract filled with fine sand, It's a real roller coaster.

An order of mopane worms is an entire bowl. I ate three of worms before I had to give up, which honestly took everything I had. I still feel a little ill thinking of them today.

api• 3 years ago

Down there with fried spider should be something this doesn’t go into at all: the large amount of utterly vile ultra processed “food” available at American supermarkets and fast food restaurants.

Anything that lists nonspecific “meat” as an ingredient sounds at least as horrifying as brains and eyeballs and could in fact be brains and eyeballs. Does “meat” imply mammal or will anything that is motile and that aerobically respirates qualify?

The things they attempt to call “cheese…” The fraction of petroleum called “American cheese” is bad enough but then there are things that come in a tube or a spray can.

Then there’s McDonalds. What do they put in their burgers? Feel sick every time I’ve eaten it. I’ll take the spider legs. At least I know what it is.

pjmlp• 3 years ago

Who came up with this list?!?

Lots of nices ones that I have gladly tasted, while others make me willing to try them out.

legerdemain4• 3 years ago

Bizarrely, #5 in rated the absolute worst in the world is a brand of mild and boring French grandpa candy. For US readers, imagine Werther's caramels being voted as one of the most disgusting foods. Wut?

julienfr112• 3 years ago

My grandpa actually live 10km from where it's produced, and is a good customer. I attribute the bad rating to the fact that it is a really hard candy, that cannot be munched but has to be sucked.

rahen• 3 years ago

I was surprised too. Those candies taste like some mild Mentos, or large Tic-Tacs. I hardly see how this could be so upsetting as to be #5 in the list, right next to fried spiders.

In fact, most of the list makes so little sense I believe this article might have been automatically generated.

fresmi69• 3 years ago

Pretty sure some canned stews should be on here.

sdwr• 3 years ago

Interesting combo of disgusting and boring. Glad mayo-based sauces are getting the shellacking they deserve.

Worst Rated Dishes in the World

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