3 min readPuneMar 29, 2024 01:06 AM IST
First published on: Mar 29, 2024 at 01:06 AM IST
In 2023, Vada Pav was ranked 13th in the ‘Best Sandwiches in the World’ on Taste Atlas. However this year, it has slipped to number 19. Every year, this World Food Atlas project releases rankings for best dishes, cuisines, cheeses, food cities and most legendary restaurants in the world.
Vada Pav currently has a rating of 4.3 on 5 on their website. About the origins of this street food, it says, “This iconic street food is said to have originated from a street vendor named Ashok Vaidya, who worked near Dadar train station in 1960s and 1970s. He thought of a way to satiate hungry workers, and gathered that the ideal dish should be portable, affordable and easy to prepare. Thus came about the vada pav, and its popularity skyrocketed, especially after Shiv Sena, a Marathi-Hindu nationalist political party, began to promote the sandwich as an ideal working class snack.”
While India ranked 11th in best cuisines in the world, some regional specialities have made it to the top in other categories. Hyderabadi Biryani ranked 29 in best rice dishes. Rasmalai bagged second rank in the best cheese dessert category and Achappam ranked 39 in best donuts list.
This year, the rankings comprised 10,927 catalogued dishes, and 6,119 food products and ingredients. The results were based on 3,95,205 (271,819 valid) dish ratings, and 1,15,660 (80,863 valid) food product ratings.
This project is dedicated to cataloguing and promoting local ingredients, traditional recipes, and authentic restaurants.
For the rankings, visitors vote through the year on the official website. These votes are then tallied and published. Foods that record the best average per category make it to the top of the list. For the ranking of cuisines, if two cuisines have the same average rating, the one with the highest-rated dish is ranked higher.
In the past, controversies have broken about these rankings being rigged, and accusations were made about lack of transparency. Matija Babić, the Croatian journalist and entrepreneur who launched the project in 2018, defended the methodology in an article in 2023. He wrote, “Our key mechanism is a system we developed that differentiates genuine from invalid votes. We track the visitor’s behaviour on our web, we track all his ratings, and depending on whether the system recognises him as a real visitor or as a nationalist or a bot, his votes are recognised or ignored.”
In 2022, the official twitter handle clarified, “Some votes are recognised by our system as invalid (eg nationalist votes: people from one country give high marks to their dishes and low marks to their neighbours. We don’t count such votes).”
This project is dedicated to cataloguing and promoting local ingredients, traditional recipes, and authentic restaurants.
Share
