Baku Kitchen is an ad-free reference of traditional food. 6,130 dishes and drinks from 196 countries, each with what it is, where it comes from, and — for 5,004 of them so far — a full recipe. There are no rankings, no sponsored dishes and no restaurant promotions, and there never will be.
The pictures are drawings
Every picture on this site is drawn for the atlas in one manga style. A drawing here is this site’s own depiction of a dish rather than a photograph of someone’s plate: consistent from Samoa to Slovenia, free of restaurant marketing, and honest about what it is. The images are made with an image model and the alt text describes each one truthfully.
Every dish in the atlas now has its own drawing, made for that dish and no other. Two are still waiting for theirs, and they show their food type on the card rather than an apology.
What the writing is, and is not
The descriptions and history notes were written from general knowledge, not compiled from cited sources, and they carry no per-fact citation. They are accurate to the best of the writing and they are not a substitute for a reference work with footnotes. If you find something wrong, please say so — see Contact.
Recipes
Not every dish has a recipe yet. A dish without one says so plainly instead of borrowing another country’s method, because a missing recipe is honest and a wrong one is not. Where two countries use one name for two unrelated things — Armenian harissa is a wheat and chicken porridge, Tunisian harissa is a chilli paste — they are separated rather than merged.
Ratings and nutrition
There are no star ratings, reviews or review counts on this site, and no dish carries a score. A reference page does not need one, and a rating assembled from a handful of voices would say more about who turned up than about the dish.
The nutrition panel on a dish page is deliberately empty. The atlas holds no food-composition data, and a reader on a medical diet could act on a guess.
Chef Baku
Chef Baku is a mascot and a drawing. He is your guide around the atlas; he has not cooked these recipes in a test kitchen, and nothing on this site claims he has.