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50 free Asian Food trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Asia's food is usually quizzed through five or six famous cuisines, which leaves most of the continent untouched. The dumplings of Nepal, the fermented pastes of Cambodia, the steppe feasts of Mongolia, the pot-flipping rice dishes of the Levant and the night-market inventions of Taiwan all have origin stories that are stranger and better than the menu descriptions suggest. These 50 questions spread across twenty cuisines, from the Philippines and Indonesia through Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Myanmar and Central Asia to Iran, Jordan and Palestine. Each asks about a dish, drink or custom you can find on its own page: who invented it, what it is really made of, what its name means, and the festival or breakfast table it belongs to. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds a fact beyond the question. Play it to find out how much of the continent you have actually eaten, or print it for a food-themed quiz night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Mongolian barbecue was invented in Taipei in 1951 by Wu Zhaonan, a refugee from Beijing later famous as what?
A comedian
A comedian is what Wu Zhaonan became after leaving the restaurant business, so the 'Mongolian' dish was a Beijing refugee's Taipei street-stall invention.
Q 02Hong Kong's pineapple bun contains no pineapple at all; what does its name actually describe?
Its crusty topping
Its crusty topping is the 'pineapple': the cracked, sugary crust resembles the fruit's skin, and the bun is now a fixture of Chinatown bakeries worldwide.
Q 03Din Tai Fung, the Taipei chain famous for its soup dumplings, was founded in 1958 as a shop selling what?
Cooking oil
Cooking oil was the trade: founder Yang Bing-yi had spent ten years at the oil retailer Heng Tai Fung and named his own shop after it and his supplier, DinMei Oils.
Q 04Which Indonesian meatball soup did Barack Obama, raised partly in Indonesia, recall as a childhood favourite?
Bakso
Bakso, meatballs in clear broth with noodles, got a presidential endorsement when Obama listed it among the foods he remembered from his Indonesian boyhood in a speech.
Q 05Jollibee, the Philippine fast-food chain, began in 1975 in Quezon City as what kind of business?
An ice cream parlour
An ice cream parlour selling Magnolia ice cream was the start; when the hot food outsold the ice cream, the Tan family converted it into the first Jollibee outlet in 1978.
Q 06Arak, the anise spirit of Lebanon and Syria, turns from clear to milky white when it is mixed with what?
Water
Water does it: anethole, the essential oil of anise, dissolves in alcohol but not in water, so the traditional one-to-two dilution clouds the glass.
Q 07Hong Kong-style milk tea is nicknamed after which garment, which the cloth bag used to strain it resembles?
Silk stockings
Silk stockings give 'silk-stocking milk tea' its name, and the brewing technique with the stocking-like bag is recognised by Hong Kong's government as intangible cultural heritage.
Q 08Myanmar's lahpet thoke is a salad built on the pickled, fermented form of which crop?
Tea leaves
Tea leaves, fermented and eaten rather than brewed, are unique to this corner of Asia; a Burmese saying holds that 'of all the leaves, lahpet's the best'.
Q 09Beshbarmak, the boiled meat and noodle dish of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, has a Turkic name that means what?
Five fingers
Five fingers refers to the traditional way of eating the dish: with the hands, scooping up the noodles and meat without cutlery.
Q 10Which cone-shaped rice dish was declared Indonesia's official national dish by the tourism ministry in 2014?
Tumpeng
Tumpeng, a cone of rice ringed with side dishes, was chosen as 'the dish that binds the diversity' of Indonesian cuisine, ahead of the unofficial favourite nasi goreng.
Q 11Rijsttafel, the colonial Dutch banquet of dozens of small Indonesian dishes, is a Dutch word literally meaning what?
Rice table
Rice table is the literal meaning; the Dutch adapted the spread from the Padang way of serving and used it to impress visitors with the abundance of their colonial empire.
Q 12Which Malaysian national dish, literally 'fatty rice', is cooked in coconut milk and eaten with fried anchovies and egg?
Nasi lemak
Nasi lemak gets its richness from rice steamed in coconut milk with pandan leaf, and it has travelled as far as Australia's Christmas and Cocos Islands.
Q 13Which frothy Malaysian milk tea, the national drink, is named for being poured repeatedly between two containers?
Teh tarik
Q 21Which Nepali dish of fermented, sun-dried leafy greens is made like sauerkraut or kimchi, except that no salt is added?
Gundruk
Gundruk is fermented for about a week at around 18 °C until it turns mildly acidic, then dried in the sun, using the glut of mustard and radish greens at harvest.
Q 22Nihari, the slow-cooked stew that became a Karachi institution after 1947, is named from an Arabic word meaning what?
Morning
Morning is the meaning of nahâr: Mughal nawabs ate nihari as a breakfast course after the dawn Fajr prayer, and it is still served first thing.
Q 23Kashmiri noon chai, the pink tea popular across Pakistan, gets its colour from brewing green tea with milk and what?
Baking soda
Teh tarik means 'pulled tea': the pouring from a height cools the brew and gives it a frothy head, and it is a fixture of mamak stalls and kopitiams.
Q 14Bak kut teh, the pork-rib soup linked to the Malaysian port of Klang, has a Hokkien name that literally means what?
Meat bone tea
Meat bone tea contains no tea at all: the ribs simmer for hours with herbs and spices, and the tea is drunk alongside in the belief that it dissolves the fat.
Q 15Singapore's chilli crab is traced to Cher Yam Tian and her husband, who from 1956 sold stir-fried crab from what?
A pushcart
A pushcart was the first chilli crab stall: the couple stir-fried crabs with bottled chilli and tomato sauce, launching what is now a Singapore signature.
Q 16Singapore's chicken rice was adapted from the Wenchang chicken dishes of immigrants from which southern Chinese island?
Hainan
Hainan's emigrants carried the dish wherever they settled, so the same poached chicken and seasoned rice turns up across Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.
Q 17Appam, the fermented rice-flour pancakes of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, go by what English name in Sri Lanka?
Hoppers
Hoppers is the Sri Lankan name, and the pancakes are eaten for breakfast or dinner with a side such as vegetable or egg curry.
Q 18Which Sri Lankan street dish of chopped flatbread is famous for the clatter of iron blades that carries down the street?
Kottu
Kottu is made by pounding chopped roti with vegetables on a hot griddle, and the rhythmic sound can usually be heard from a long distance.
Q 19Ceylon's planters switched to tea after 1869, when which fungal disease wiped out Sri Lanka's earlier plantation crop?
Coffee leaf rust
Coffee leaf rust, Hemileia vastatrix, wiped out the coffee estates and pushed planters into tea, which is why Sri Lanka became a byword for black tea rather than coffee.
Q 20Nepal's momo dumplings are popularly believed to have been brought home by Nepali merchants who traded where?
Tibet
Tibet is where travelling Newar merchants are said to have picked up the recipe, which explains why the dish first caught on in the Newar community.
Baking soda reacts with the gunpowder green tea to turn the brew pink, and 'noon' means salt in Kashmiri, the seasoning it is served with.
Q 24Kabuli pulao, Afghanistan's signature rice dish, is crowned with which caramelised vegetable and which dried fruit?
Carrots and raisins
Carrots and raisins, sweetened by caramelising, are scattered over rice steamed with marinated meat, giving the dish its sweet-savoury signature.
Q 25Which lemongrass-scented fish and rice-noodle soup, sold as an all-day breakfast, is the national dish of Myanmar?
Mohinga
Mohinga is garnished with boiled eggs, coriander and crispy fritters, and though it began as a breakfast dish it is now eaten at any hour.
Q 26Which Cambodian province names the peppercorn that in 2010 became Cambodia's first geographically protected product?
Kampot
Kampot pepper was described as early as the 13th century by the Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan, and the European Union added its own protected status in 2016.
Q 27Which fermented fish paste, with a smell likened to ripe Camembert, is the Khmer staple nicknamed 'Cambodian cheese'?
Prahok
Prahok's pungency, compared to Limburger as well as Camembert, earns it the nickname and makes it the seasoning backbone of Khmer cuisine.
Q 28The Cambodian town of Skuon draws tourists for which crunchy snack, thought to date from Khmer Rouge-era food shortages?
Tarantulas
Tarantulas the size of a human palm, fried in oil and called a-ping in Khmer, are bred in holes in the ground in villages north of Skuon or foraged from nearby forest.
Q 29In which Southeast Asian country is an estimated 85% of the rice crop the sticky, glutinous kind?
Laos
Laos grows mostly sticky rice, and the waxy mutation behind it is thought to have first arisen in the upland regions of mainland Southeast Asia.
Q 30Or lam, the tongue-numbing stew of Luang Prabang, gets its peppery bite from simmering which unusual ingredient?
Chili wood
Chili wood, sakhaan, is simmered with lemongrass and chilies into a thick broth, and the original royal recipe called for deer meat.