The world’s best countries for food create unique cuisine. Australia doesn’t

Wilson Villar’s restaurant is all the way out in Lince, hardly the coolest of Lima’s many neighbourhoods. It’s not like Barranco or Miraflores, places tourists tend to stay, fancy suburbs filled with the eateries currently winning global fame for Peruvian cuisine.

Still, Meriba is being noticed. Here, Wilson serves the food of his homeland, the Amazon, utilising ingredients that will be entirely unfamiliar to most foreign diners: a wild array of flavours and textures harnessed in a range of traditional recipes.

Aji de cocona was only recently invented.Credit: Alamy

It’s when Villar is serving one of these dishes that I’m struck by something he says. He points to one of the sauces, aji de cocona, which he explains is based around a bright orange fruit from the Amazon. The cocona is intensely sour, but when blended with local chillies, coriander and salt, it forms a beautifully flavoured condiment for fish and meat.

“This is a new sauce in Peru,” Wilson tells me. “It was only invented recently. But now everyone is using it.”

That’s the bit I’m struck by: how naturally, almost flippantly, he tells me about Peru’s new favourite sauce. Because, I’m thinking, when was the last time Australia came up with a new sauce? In fact, is there a single sauce that we can claim as our own?

I love the food scene in Australia. I love the diversity of cuisines we have here, I love the relaxed, friendly nature of our restaurants and I love the high-quality produce that our chefs and cooks use.

But what have we actually come up with for ourselves?

After that meal in Peru, I did a quick Google search for distinctly Australian dishes to make sure I hadn’t forgotten any, and the results were depressing, to say the least.

One of the top hits was a CNN list called 40 dishes locals like to call their own. It includes Australian favourites like lamingtons and pavlova but also macadamia nuts, john dory fillets and Balmain bugs. Those aren’t dishes; they’re ingredients.

And then there’s Iced Vo-Vos, barbecued sausages, and fairy bread. Not to mention Anzac biscuits, burgers with beetroot, and Vegemite on toast.

Are we really so culturally bereft? So lacking in ideas? Have we imported such amazing food from other countries that we just haven’t bothered to come up with a cuisine of our own?

And if I’m wrong – and CNN is also wrong – then what are the really impressive Australian dishes? What are the complex, unique, delicious plates of food that are entirely our own?

Vegemite on toast. Is it the best we can do?Credit: Eamon Gallagher

I’m not really here to whinge, though. What I want to do instead is pay tribute to the countries that are incredibly creative when it comes to cuisine, which travellers can visit to experience a whole world of gastronomy that isn’t just hybrids of other people’s ideas.

Japan is an obvious one that springs to mind, though it’s also an interesting example. Japan does have a wealth of cuisine it can call its own, recipes that have evolved over centuries and are still loved today.

However, many of its most famous dishes – from ramen to tempura, katsu to gyoza – are adaptations of foreign ideas. I guess the difference is that those adaptations are now so clearly Japanese as to divorce them from their original inspiration.

China is another powerhouse when it comes to unique food, with seven distinct cuisines of original ideas, all easily accessible to visitors to the country. Nearby nations such as Vietnam and Thailand, meanwhile, might have been influenced by China and its migrating population, but they each have rich, diverse food cultures of their own.

You would have to point out India too, which is in some ways very famous for food, though in other ways completely misunderstood. This is a country with a huge range of cuisines that span far more than the classic Punjabi-influenced menus you see at pretty much every Indian restaurant outside the subcontinent.

We should mention the famous foodie nations of Europe as well: France and Italy are the best known, though Spain deserves a place on the podium. Each country has its own style, its own favourite ingredients, its own dishes, its own classic sauces, its own take on coffee (Italy, good; Spain and France, bad).

North Africa has incredible, unique food. The Levant, through Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, is the same.

Mexico is unbelievably diverse and creative, particularly if you go in there expecting to eat the same few tacos and burritos that you’ve been served in Australia your entire life. This country has ingredients and techniques harnessed and developed over centuries, which you will find nowhere else.

And then we have Peru, where cooks are just casually coming up with new sauces and everyone is carrying on like it’s completely normal. It’s not normal.

Yes, Australia is a little bereft, and we’ve probably been too happy to pinch other people’s ideas instead of focusing on our own.

But the leading countries in creativity and craftsmanship are outliers that we really have to respect. And, of course, visit. To see what’s new.