Food and drink guide
Updated
Everybody eats, which makes food prompts feel easy. That’s exactly why they are crowded: the answers on every dinner table are the answers on every scoreboard.
Use the supermarket in your head
Picture walking down the aisle for the category. Fruit and vegetables have an obvious front display, but further back there are speciality items, frozen foods and the world-foods shelf. Each shelf is a route to answers other people skip.
Travel by cuisine
Food categories split cleanly by country, which makes the specificity ladder easy to climb:
- Citrus: Japan gives yuzu, sudachi and kabosu; the Philippines gives calamansi; Australia has finger lime.
- Pasta: go region by region in Italy: orecchiette from Puglia, trofie from Liguria, pici from Tuscany, malloreddus from Sardinia.
- Cheese: pick a country beyond France and Italy: Spain’s Manchego and Idiazabal, the Netherlands’ Leerdammer, Cyprus’s Halloumi and Greece’s Kefalotyri.
- Vegetables: think of Asian greens (bok choy, gai lan), roots (salsify, celeriac, jicama) and old garden crops (kohlrabi, cardoon).
Branded and menu items
Prompts like “name a fast-food menu item” reward people who travel or remember. Limited-time items, regional menus and chains from other countries are full of deep cuts, but only name things that really existed, and use the name on the menu.
Drinks and cocktails
Cocktails have a famous front row (Mojito, Margarita, Martini) and a long classic back catalogue: Last Word, Corpse Reviver, Aviation, Paper Plane, Bee’s Knees. Pre-Prohibition and tiki drinks are good routes.
Practise
Food prompts are a great place to learn because the lists are concrete. Work through the answer lists below, then test yourself with unlimited dives.