Why isn't Bangladeshi cuisine globally recognised?

Graphis: TBS

When Kishwar Chowdhury stood before millions of viewers on MasterChef Australia and cooked panta bhat (fermented rice soaked overnight in water), she was doing more than presenting a dish from her childhood. She was making an argument about her Bangladeshi identity.

Kishwar believes the problem was never that Bangladeshi food lacked sophistication. It was that Bangladesh itself was poorly understood.

"When we were growing up in Australia, people never really knew about Bangladesh," she said. "They would think, 'Okay, you are part of India, and you are brown.'"

For her, that was not something to work around by making Bangladeshi food more familiar to foreign audiences. Instead, she walked on with panta bhat, the kind of dish tens of millions of Bangladeshis eat in the morning without thinking twice. The audience had no idea what to expect from it. Because the country that produced it had never formally introduced itself at the table.

Bangladeshi cuisine has a distinctive geography, history and culinary vocabulary. But while Thai, Korean, Japanese and Peruvian food have been turned into recognisable global brands, Bangladesh is still struggling to give its cuisine a name that the world can easily identify.

The problem is that it has never fully defined, codified or marketed its cuisine.

The identity crisis of Bangladeshi cuisine

To understand Bangladeshi cuisine, it helps to look beyond the restaurant menu. Bangladesh is a riverine, deltaic and monsoon civilisation, and its food reflects that geography.

Global cuisines rarely become recognisable simply because they offer many dishes. They succeed when those dishes are understood as part of a coherent place, history and way of life.

Bangladesh also has dishes that serve as shorthand for distinct urban and regional identities: kacchi biryani in Dhaka, Tehari, Morog Pulao, fuchka, chotpoti and a vast variety of bhorta.

New York-based chef and Khalil's Food owner Md Khalilur Rahman argues that these distinctions are precisely what Bangladesh should be showcasing. He points to kacchi biryani, Tehari and Morog Pulao as dishes that can be positioned clearly as Bangladeshi rather than absorbed into the generic international category of 'Indian food'. Fuchka and chotpoti, too, have distinct identities, even if international consumers know related foods by names such as pani puri or bhel puri.

His franchise operation, built around kacchi biryani and tehari, has been expanding across all 50 US states since 2024 — a commercial proof of concept for his argument about the distinctiveness of Bangladeshi cuisine.

"There is no equivalent dish called tehari in India," he said. "So it is one of our unique culinary items. Morog Pulao is another. It is a dish that exists in no neighbouring culinary tradition."

"If you ask a foreigner to identify Korean or Chinese food, they can often distinguish it quite easily," he said. "We need to create that same clarity around Bangladeshi cuisine."

Kishwar Chowdhury believes Bangladesh already has that coherence.

"I think our gastronomic identity is very strong and very distinctive," Chowdhury said. "It is not like North Indian or South Indian or any other cuisine. It is very distinctive."

"Our problem is that we don't have a consolidated identity," she said.

The irony is that the world has already begun to encounter parts of that identity — often without knowing where they came from.

Few countries have a stronger diaspora-based restaurant infrastructure than Bangladesh, yet much of it developed under somebody else's culinary label.

In Britain, Bangladeshi migrants, particularly from Sylhet, became central to the curry-house industry. The Bangladesh Caterers Association estimates that around 80% of Britain's so-called Indian restaurants were Bangladeshi-owned, although estimates vary by source and period. Restaurants became an important economic foothold for the community, but the market category was already established: 'Indian'.

Khalil described a similar experience in the United States. "Bangladeshi restaurants can still find themselves categorised as Indian or having to use formulations such as 'Bangladeshi-Indian cuisine'," he said. Even in New York, where major global cuisines are well represented, Bangladeshi food remains underrepresented as a distinct category. 

"This is not simply a restaurant-sector problem. It is a soft-power problem."

Kishwar Chowdhury said Bangladesh's everyday foods are its strength, but "the problem is that we don't appreciate them enough ourselves."

Australia-based author and food critic Shubhajit Bhowmik argued that Bangladesh must also be willing to adapt.

"Bangla-Chinese cuisine provides an obvious domestic example," he said. Chinese food was adapted to Bangladeshi tastes, creating something that balanced culinary identity with consumer preferences.

The same principle should apply when Bangladeshi food travels, Bhowmik said. "We need to find that sweet spot where we can serve food with a distinctly Bangladeshi identity and flavour, without insisting that it must be entirely authentic in the traditional sense."

How countries branded their cuisines

Thailand recognised the commercial and diplomatic potential of food early. Its Global Thai programme, launched in 2002, encouraged the international expansion of Thai restaurants, while the Thai SELECT certification system gave restaurants abroad an official framework to identify and promote themselves as Thai.

The lesson for Bangladesh is not to copy Thailand's menus or reduce its cuisine to a handful of dishes. It is to treat restaurants abroad as part of its international infrastructure — introducing customers not only to food, but also to the country's culture and tourism.

South Korea offers another model. Its effort to globalise hansik, or Korean cuisine, gathered momentum from 2009 as part of a broader cultural-export strategy. Food travelled alongside music, television, beauty and tourism, reinforcing Korea's wider cultural presence.

We need to break what I would call our 'illusion of authenticity' — the belief that if a dish is changed in any way, it is no longer genuinely Bangladeshi. That mindset may preserve tradition, but it can also prevent a cuisine from travelling. A cuisine becomes global when it is allowed to evolve.

Shubhajit Bhowmik, Australia-based author and food critic

Japan took a different route. In 2013, UNESCO inscribed washoku on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list, defining it as a traditional dietary culture rooted in geography, ingredients, seasonality, social practices and respect for nature. Bangladesh has yet to undertake similar intellectual work at scale.

Peru offers perhaps the closest parallel. Its global culinary reputation was built by chefs, restaurants, writers and entrepreneurs before PromPerú incorporated gastronomy into its international promotion, linking food with tourism and the country's global image.

Bangladesh has one precedent for formal recognition: in 2017, it secured a Geographical Indication for hilsa, legally establishing its geographic origin. Yet the designation has not been followed by a major international promotion or export-branding campaign to make ilish a globally recognisable symbol of Bangladeshi food culture.

Bangladesh needs a national culinary strategy

The FY2026-27 budget provides a larger platform for such a strategy. The Ministry of Civil Aviation and Tourism has been allocated Tk1,884 crore, up 44.9% from the revised Tk1,300 crore allocation in the previous fiscal year. 

The government aims to raise tourism's contribution to GDP to 6–7%, alongside heritage restoration, cultural festivals and tourism development.

The Bangladesh Tourism Board has already experimented with food as a tourism instrument through its Taste of Bangladesh festival, which brings together regional food traditions and producers. 

But a tourism budget is not automatically a culinary strategy.

Khalil said the government could work with Bangladeshi communities abroad to organise food festivals and promotional events, with the tourism sector playing a central role. "We are promoting Bangladeshi food ourselves, at our own pace and using our own resources, but there is very little official engagement with us," he said.

He also proposed creating a database of Bangladeshi chefs working internationally and using successful chefs as culinary ambassadors.

Shubhajit Bhowmik believes that Bangladesh must also rethink its approach to authenticity.

"We need to break what I would call our 'illusion of authenticity' — the belief that if a dish is changed in any way, it is no longer genuinely Bangladeshi," he said. "That mindset may preserve tradition, but it can also prevent a cuisine from travelling. A cuisine becomes global when it is allowed to evolve."

He urged Bangladeshi chefs to experiment with spice levels, combinations and presentation while retaining a recognisable national identity.

"If we can find that balance between Bangladeshi identity and international palatability," he said, "there is no reason why Bangladeshi cuisine cannot become as globally recognised as Korean, Thai, Chinese or Indian cuisine."