Here's What People Have to Say About Kinalas, Pinoy Spaghetti + More on the "Worst Rated" Dishes List

(SPOT.ph) Food is deeply personal; it's a part of our day-to-day lives after all. So when a dish near and dear to a culture's heart gets listed among the "worst"—especially when it's from a foreign website, and those dishes hail from a country with a long colonial history—well, expect a shitstorm. Online food resource TasteAtlas, for one, landed in hot water this past weekend for their inclusion of certain Filipino dishes in their recently posted Worst Rated Dishes list.

Also read: Lumpiang Shanghai Was Named Best Filipino Dish and Pinoys Aren't Having It

Filipinos online react to TasteAtlas' list of the "Worst Rated" Dishes:

A Facebook post on TasteAtlas' Worst Rated foods included Pinoy spaghetti (the deliberately sweetish Filipino take on pasta) at 81st; hotsilog (the hotdog-fried rice-fried egg power combo plate) at 36th; and kinalas (a Bicolano fave with noodles, the meat from a pig or cow's head, and a sauce enriched with its brain) at 17th. Balut—listed in ninth place—is the only dish that remains on the full list on their website, as of writing.

In any case, Filipinos and other folks from around the world (especially those from nations whose dishes likewise landed on the list) had a lot to say. "Walang basagan ng trip," writes a commenter on the Facebook post. "Hotsilog is pure comfort food, some people just don't understand," writes another. Similar sentiments were aired over on Twitter, including a suggestion from a user to "declare the people behind TasteAtlas persona non grata."

Kinalas, in particular, received plenty of love from Bicolanos and others. Travel and Gastronomy Media Specialist Clang Garcia, for one, wrote a Facebook post expressing her adoration for the karinderia classic. "Every spoonful of the soup is comforting and collagenous with a depth of flavor...," she shares. "Food is culture, and to create such [categories or list of worst-rated foods] is disrespectful of time-honored traditions."

Worth looking into, however, is how TasteAtlas—which describes themselves as a "world food atlas" that catalogues different dishes from around the world (with more than 15,000 in their database!), and lets you browse and rate these from one to five stars—actually came up with the list, and other lists they've published. There's no mention of their methodology for this specific Worst Rated Dishes list on the website. For their Best Traditional Food in the World list in 2022, though, they clarified their ways through a series of tweets in December: "Throughout the year, people rate those foods (not cuisines) in our database." Some votes—e.g. what they call "nationalist votes," or when "people from one country give high marks to their dishes and low marks to their neighbors"—are recognized by their system as "invalid" and thus not counted. The website also published a World Cuisines Ranking list in 2022, for which ratings were described to have been "obtained by the users average rating of the 30 best dishes, beverages and food products in that country." 

In a 2018 interview with Total Croatia News, founder Matija Babic shared that TasteAtlas "[compiles] reviews from professional food critics and local experts," along with recommendations for where to try those dishes.

Check out the first, second, and third pages of TasteAtlas' Worst Rated Dishes in the World list.

Hey, Spotters! Check us out on Viber to join our Community and subscribe to our Chatbot.