Your Favourite Cuisines?

[RiverNotch]

For my answer to this question, I made a list! The order here is geographic, from east to west.

1. The first cuisine I was cognizant of as being a cuisine is Japanese. My dad works for a Japanese company, so he, and by extension us, had grown somewhat familiar with Japanese cuisine, though he much more than us -- while I know there are differences between different regions of Japan, I can't say I favor one over the other. The dish I'd have representing this cuisine is the sushi wrapped in persimmon leaves we got from some hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Nara.​
2. The cuisine I take for granted: Filipino, but because I actually live here I can be specific and say Kapampangan. Sure, my maternal grandmother was from Pampanga, but I don't have to introduce myself in that way for everyone here to complement their (our?) way of cooking, even when not considering the dishes that are distinctively theirs (ours?). My representative dish for this cuisine is my grandmother's dinuguan, a stew made with pig's blood and flavoured with camias (Averrhoa bilimbi, says Google xD).​
3. Another cuisine we Filipinos generally take for granted is Chinese cuisine, and due to geographic proximity that typically means Cantonese. The restaurant Ma Mon Luk is something of an institution here in Metro Manila, known for their siopao and mami: siopao is basically cha siu bao, while mami is the bami brought by Ma from his native Canton that was eventually named after him. Both dishes are ubiquitous nowadays, but my favourite versions are still from that one restaurant, with their fundamentally inimitable mami -- they make it with their own distinctive master stock, after all -- being my representative dish.​
4. I was inspired to make this list having a nice Indian brunch, so this goes fourth. The Indian influences in our cuisine should be strong, what with our original indigenous alphabets being Brahmic and all that, but I don't normally detect it: maybe it's what's at root of our green curry, but I'm not even sure if the use of the term here was from India in the first place. Like with Japanese cuisine, I don't really know how to distinguish between Indian regional cuisines, although I get the sense that all the Indian places near me at the moment are from the north, including my representative dish here, soan papdi (all the times I've had it, it was imported).​
5. Levantine cuisine has recently become somewhat ubiquitous here, but usually it's in the form of hummus or shawarma. Something that's as rare as hen's teeth here that I've since grown to love is falafel, which was gonna be my brunch today until the nearest falafel place to where I am told me they were out :( It's the perfect lenten food, too, and right now is the fasting season anticipating Christmas for the majority of Christians in the Levant.

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6. Finding a nearby Greek place whose owner had once immigrated from here to Greece has really ignited my love for this particular cuisine. She'd evidently married someone who is not only Greek but also has family that owns an olive plantation near Kalamata, and my goodness, even if all her recipes had not come from that man's giagia the olives alone are worth every visit! In fact, can I just have those olives be my representative dish here? Along with some of their oil, of which I'd order shotglasses if that weren't too a weird thing to do? But fine, I'll have the whole horiatiki instead.​
7. Aside from Japanese and Filipino, the one cuisine I came to understand as a cuisine during my youth was that of the Italians, with the dish I'd choose to represent them here being about as simple as the aforementioned serving of olives: a pizza margherita. I have no idea if the place my sister once found run by an actual Italian served that pizza, since it closed before I myself could pay a visit, so the nearest-to-authentic I have gotten is from a restaurant that's become something of a chain here called Amare la cucina, but to be less commercial, I might as well cite my own attempts at making said dish! The crust was appropriately bubbly, as I'd cold-fermented the dough for about three days, but lacking a proper pizza oven I don't get enough charred bits on top or crispy bits at the bottom. Oh well xD​
8. Some time after coming to apprehend what it meant for a cuisine to be a cuisine, I underwent a phase where I insisted the family try making some fancy French dishes, especially following the recipes written down by Julia Child or presented by Sandy Daza. I don't yet know how the regional cuisines of Greece or the Levant differ from one another, but as for those of Italy and France, I know it's usually from these countries' respective souths that I appreciate the most. For the former, it's because of the global reach of Italian-American cooking, but for the latter, it's because their ingredients are easier for me to get. Despite this, I'll go with something more universal for my representative dish here, especially since it's something I can actually make on a regular basis: a plain old omelette.​
9. It's kinda funny how I'm skipping over Spanish cuisine here, in favor of two cuisines it very strongly influenced. The first, I've already mentioned, being that of my home country; the second is Mexican. I doubt I've had "authentic" Mexican food myself, with the dish I remember most fondly being me and my sister's attempt at making burrito bowls, but the influence of Mexican cuisine in and of itself is very much palpable here in the Philippines, down to the names of some of our otherwise native dishes. Champorado? In Mexico, that's a chocolate drink made with masa; here, it's a rice porridge made with chocolate. Tamales? Once again, the Mexican version is made with corn, while here it's made with rice and banana leaves. Chicharon? Okay, that one's basically the same, though from what I understand Philippine chicharon tends to be crispier, while Mexican chicharrones are more flavorful. Kinilaw? Actually, that's just the Filipino term for ceviche....​

Yeah, the Mexican and Philippine cuisines are siblings, though in a lot of ways I find Mexican is better appreciated, which in a rather chauvinistic way sorta stings xD. Mainly it's to do with Mexico's close proximity to the great globalizing force that is the United States, but also I think it's because of the different ways by which poverty affects both our countries. Here in the Philippines, at least, the lower classes seem to have less and less access to the most basic of flavorings, let alone actual carbs or protein, while our native food cultures are under stiff foreign competition among us middle and upper classes. My parents' and grandparents' experience of poverty, at least, let them enjoy fried crickets or milk fresh from the carabao's teat, but I feel the sprawl's encroachment on our countryside has recently grown unchecked, with many nearby farms and fallows being replaced by gated communities which are never fully inhabited, and all that sets aside the already-felt effects of global warming....

Ah, but two successive paragraphs ending in ellipses signal how I've begun to wax nostalgic, though I suppose nostalgia is the general impulse behind this post. And so, dear readers, it's your turn to be read. As per the title, what are your favourite cuisines, and what dish best represents each of them?​