Vegan Cuisine Guide: Plant-Based Foods Worldwide (2024)

One of the best ways to explore vegan cooking is to hop from one cuisine to the next. This will expose you to an incredible variety of dishes, relying on all manner of ingredients, cooking techniques, and seasonings.

Vegan Cuisine Possibilities

Vegans don’t gravitate to a single cuisine, since they’ve got so many standout choices. But some parts of the world are far more vegan-friendly than others. If you’re already vegan or you lean in that direction, it’s helpful to know which cuisines offer the most satisfying plant-based meals.

To help you on your way, check out my guides below. They’ll acquaint you with the most exciting and reliably vegan dining options. You’ll also discover some of the most popular international dishes to cook at home.

• Ethiopian Food
• Indian Food
• Italian Food
• Japanese Food
• Mexican Food
• Middle Eastern Food
• Soul Food
• Thai Food
• Vietnamese Food

Top Cuisines for Cooking Plant-Based Meals at Home

If you want to step up your cooking skills, there’s no better way to do it than to explore new cuisines. They’ll expose you to all sorts of new dishes and cooking techniques. You’ll reap big rewards from stepping outside your culture and your comfort zone.

Consider starting with Mexican food. It offers a vast assortment of delicious and healthy plant-based dishes, and most are remarkably easy to prepare.

When you’re ready to branch out to try other cuisines, you have countless enticing possibilities. See the Cuisines from Around the World section of our cookbooks page for 20 different recommendations. And if you want a “greatest hits” collection of international recipes packed into a single cookbook, pick up Vegan Eats World by Terry Hope Romano.

Finding Vegan-Friendly Restaurant Food

When dining out, Middle Eastern restaurants offer the most consistently vegan-friendly menus. Nearly everything that isn’t meat is commonly vegan, especially falafel, hummus, tahini dressing, tabbouleh salad, and lavash bread or pita. Many Middle Eastern restaurants also accompany your dish with an assortment of fresh vegetables, plus vegetarian dolmas, Kalamata olives, and pickled turnips.

My How to Go Vegan guide offers detailed coverage of the most vegan-friendly restaurant cuisines. Exploring these menu offerings pays off in all sorts of ways, and enables you to take your vegan diet to the next level.

For further reading please see our introduction to vegan cookingand our guide to the best vegan foods.