The Price of a Plate: What the National Dish Costs in 50 Countries (2026 Index)

One dish per country: the plate a local would name without thinking. Where a range existed we took the midpoint, and wherever possible we used the local price rather than the tourist one — pad thai is 50–60 baht at a Bangkok neighbourhood stall and 80–120 on Khao San Road, and the first number is the one in this table.

Every row carries a method flag. There are three values:

• sourced (10 rows) — a dish-specific price from a named 2025–2026 source: an industry index, a national statistics office, or reported local menu pricing. These are the rows we stand behind hardest.
• numbeo-proxy (44 rows) — no reliable dish-specific price was found, so we used Numbeo's Meal at an Inexpensive Restaurant country figure as a stand-in and named the dish that price typically buys. This is a genuine proxy, not a measurement of the dish. Where the national dish is a restaurant centrepiece (moules-frites, asado, Wiener schnitzel, fondue) the real price is usually above the proxy; where it is street food, usually below.
• estimate (2 rows) — Lebanon and Ethiopia are not covered by Numbeo and we found no verifiable 2026 price. Their figures are informed estimates, the source field is deliberately blank, and they should not be quoted as measurements.

One derivation deserves a flag: Nigeria's figure comes from the SBM Jollof Index, which prices the ingredients for a family pot rather than a restaurant plate. We divided by five servings, so it is a home-cooking cost and is not strictly comparable with a restaurant row.

Minutes-to-earn uses Numbeo country-average monthly net salaries over 173.33 working hours, except Nigeria, Ethiopia and Lebanon, which are estimated and flagged in the salary_method column. FX rates were all captured on 2 September 2026, so no cross-country comparison is polluted by a moving rate.

Known limits. Numbeo is crowdsourced and skews urban and expatriate. Cuba's dual-currency reality makes its salary figure close to meaningless in dollar terms. Argentina's peso moves fast enough that any dollar figure has a short shelf life. Portion sizes are not standardised across dishes — two smørrebrød is not the same eating experience as a full paella.