OK, I'm going to start another food thread, because I'm curious how many food-related threads I can start if I remove the "is this something other people are going to care about?" filter where food is concerned.
Let's talk cuisines.
My favorite cuisine has to be Lebanese. It's full of meat, cheese, bread, and spices. It's a lot like Turkish food, but Turkish food is heavy on tomatoes and onions, which I hate, and Lebanese food is not. It's also more heavily-spiced than most Turkish food.
My second favorite cuisine is Turkish. Turkish cuisine is more meat-heavy than Lebanese, and more creative in what they do with the meat, and of course the Turks prefer onions and tomatoes over spices, though there are plenty of spiced Turkish dishes too. Also, most of what I ate in Turkey were durum kebaps (wraps filled with meat), and I could usually get peppers (pickled in the west, cooked and fresh in the south, sadly uncooked and heatless in the north), oregano or thyme, and sumac on or in my kebap, all of which are delicious. Also, while Turkish deserts are a little sweet to my taste, by Darwin do they know how to make them. There's so much fat in Turkish deserts, and Turkish baklava uses pistachios. Once you've had baklava with pistachios, you'll wonder if the guy who came up with using walnuts was right in the head. Sadly, good, authentic Turkish food seems to be utterly absent from the United States.
My third favorite cuisine is haute American. I love how fancy restaurants have now started making bacon cheeseburgers with local bacon, cheese, and beef, pulled pork sandwiches with local pork, slow roasted ribs, barbecue sauces made with local beers and berries. I'm practically crying just thinking about it. I even had a vegetarian sandwich with a demi-baguette, roasted eggplant, fresh mozzarella, and balsamic vinegar. And don't get me started on how much deserts have improved in the past decade.
My fourth favorite cuisine is Cajun, pretty much entirely for the sausages, boudin, and fried catfish. I don't like shellfish, green beans, and a lot of other things that are essential to Cajun cuisine, but Cajun-fried fresh Louisiana catfish has pretty much ruined catfish for me. I used to eat it twice a day; now I have it less than twice a month, and and disappointed in my own skills, and probably in the freshness of the catfish.
I really loved the cuisine of western Mexico, but even when I went to San Diego and went to restaurants which advertised western Mexican origins, the only dishes that you wouldn't see at a Tex Mex place in New England were a couple of chilis (properly done and called "chile" for some reason), and hot chocolate. They did what they did well, but they didn't have the dishes I was looking for. Two in particular I remember. Duck with "jamaica" (dried hibiscus), and tarascan steak (a flank stake with oaxaca cheese and a spicy pepper sauce. I also seem to recall a good fish dish. I don't know why there seems to be so little room for regional Mexican cuisines in the United States, but it makes me sad.
After Mexican comes Tibetan (which I've only had at one restaurant, I love their steamed bread, mango yogurt drinks, and assorted yak dishes); Japanese (of which I will only eat dishes containing eel), French and Northern Italian (mostly for the duck compotes; I love duck compotes), Americanized Chinese (for General Tso's chicken and various duck dishes), Jamaican (or Jamaican BBQ; I'm not sure how authentic it is), Tex Mex, German, Cuban, Korean BBQ, and Indian, and Thai. I know I don't much like authentic Chinese or (non-barbecue) Korean food, don't much care for southern Italian food (except pizza--which is really American--and cannolis) or bas American food (except Popeye's chicken), and I don't think I've tried enough of any other cuisines to have an opinion.
In case you haven't seen the trend: I like foods with lots of fat, meat, grain, and spice. I like cuisines which do a good job of combining these. I don't much care for overly sweet foods, but will give that a pass if there's enough fat and spice.
I also have a weird thing about textures: I don't like my food chopped up into little bits, unless it's recombined into something large and solid (eg. putting mincemeat into a dumpling, frying mashed plantains); though I'm fine with foods that are naturally in small pieces, such as oatmeal and rice. I won't eat anything that's been mashed unless it would well on buttered toast (good apple sauce: yes; candied yams: no). I also don't like the texture of noodles, which are slimy. I've had some spaetzl I've liked and some I didn't, but most noodles look slimy and are flat out out. I'm definitely weird about food: I will not eat such popular dishes as lasagna, mac and cheese, or even traditional pizza (in the last case because of tomato sauce; pesto pizza is delicious).
How about you guys? What kinds of cuisines do you lot like?