Currently, for “food places” (e.g. restaurants, cafes, etc.), we have cuisine=* to describe the type of food served. As described in Key:cuisine - OpenStreetMap Wiki , the accepted values are very precise (e.g. russian).
However, I notice that some restaurants simply provide regional cuisines, and is not specific to any particular “country” cuisine. Consider a restaurant that cooks borsch; there are a lot of cuisines that have the concept of “borsch”, such as the Slavic group (e.g. Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, …) and the Inner Asian group (e.g. Kazakh, Uzbeki, …).
Then, are there any consensus on how to describe these type of cuisine when the type is regional and unclear? Is e.g. cuisine=slavic acceptable?
The question might be asking about other regions, not the current region ( for =regional ). Furthermore, =regional is often seen as a intra-national region, not international region / subcontinental.
Are you asking about localized borsch, or really those “authentic” originating from other cultures? It’s fine to create new cuisine= , and should be acceptable to use “nations” ethnic groups. You will see how messy cuisine= is though.
Not really - there are 4028 pages of values at taginfo; you can pretty much use any comma-separated list of values you like in there. For any food place beyond the “Bob’s Boring Burgers” you’ll probably have a list of possibilities that you could use.
It makes sense to try and find the best fit among previously popular values though. An example of a popular “regional” cuisine is mediterranean - 4000 of those. slavic surprisingly few, only 5. Each of the former Yugoslavian states and e.g. bulgarian seems to have more popular cuisines than that. Maybe a semicolon-separated list would work in your case?
regional is a very popular value. In a local area I guess it makes sense (“from this immediate region”) but beyond that it’s unhelpful, and from the sound of your question, not what you’re looking for.
Not to get too deep into contemporary geopolitics, but I have a feeling people are confusing Slavic stuff as “Russian stuff”. They just look at e.g. “borsch”, and then instantly think “I can find that in Moscow”, and then give it russian while not knowing they may find something basically the same also in e.g. Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland. (Ignoring the Inner Asia side for now, not too familiar with them.)
Well in the case of the countries of the former Yugoslavia, I suspect that that is exactly the issue - a place run by people from Croatia might choose to self-describe as cuisine=croatian rather than anything else.
Part of it is expectations of diners though too - this restaurant was updated from cuisine=indian to cuisine=bangladeshionly this year. Although the picture on the website shows the sign on the door as “Bangladeshi Cuisine” the website also says “Derby’s Go-To Indian Restaurant”, despite the name suggesting it is run by people celebrating a vision of the subcontinent somewhat at odds with that of the current prime minister of the country of India.
For me, someone from Poland, it is not really surprising.
For variety of reasons - historical, political, ideological and so on - national identify, European identify, local (at level of region), local (at level of city/town/village), local (at level of neighbourhood), belonging to humanity in general etc may appear. While someone feeling belonging and having identify as Slav will be extreme rarity.
Still, if it best fits restaurant…
But I would likely use something like ukrainian;russian;polish;belarusian (exact value depends on a place - may be longer or shorter) rather than slavic
Cuisines are subjective. Two restaurants can serve the same fare prepared in the same way but market themselves as different cuisines. A bunch of well-established terms in cuisine=* get appropriated for other things because of the real world, for example, “Mexican”, “Mongolian”, and “chili”. Tagging inauthentic cuisine as the real deal only creates a problem if it misleads data consumers to mislead end users.
Funny story
I once happened upon a pair of adjacent “Chinese” and “Japanese” restaurants in Florida, near Walt Disney World. I went into the Chinese restaurant. Eventually I spotted the door connecting the two restaurants, which was left ajar by accident. Through the door I could tell that the two restaurants were mirror images of each other, sharing a single kitchen and waitstaff and differing only by some decor on the walls. The waiter sheepishly admitted it’s all the same, even the menu – except I chose the cheaper side. (The same thing happened to me some years later in South Carolina.)
While countries which were recently at war (or even worse, still are) can certainly have certain reluctance to use opponent country (e.g. Croatia using cuisine=serbian or Ukraine using cuisine=russian or vice versa for same/similar food, e.g. borsch), that is not always (or even primarily) the reason.
For example, in Croatia alone, there are at least 3-5 separate cuisines that could be called cuisine=regional or cuisine=croatian. On seaside Croatia (Dalmatia), you’ll likely to have something more fitting under cuisine=mediterenian, on center (Zagreb) you’ll have completely other things most of the time (“purica s mlincima”, “zagorski štrukli”, …), while on east (Slavonija) you’re likely to have yet other things, more resembling cuisine=hungarian in many cases (“čvarci”, “fiš paprikaš”, “čobanac”…)
And on the whole of hypothetical cuisine=yugoslavia, it would’ve easily mean dozen of different cuisines, some mixing within different regions, but some completely different. for cuisine=slavic that would be waaay too ambiguous.
So I personally prefer to specify multiple of specific groups of dishes. I.e. don’t tag it as cuisine=italian but cuisine=pizza;pasta;....
Same thing with preferring e.g. cuisine=pierogi instead of cuisine=polish or cuisine=russian etc.
In any case; best also add website:menu=* to be clear and detailed
but it’s not clear which kind of “region” is meant, at least I always interpreted it to mean regions that are typically smaller than the country (albeit not necessarily limited to a single country), somehow like the hierarchy in nwn, rwn, lwn. Instead cuisine=regional to mean the “slavic region” would refer to a different kind of region, a cultural region which will often cover different geographical regions (which are usually defined by similar climate and landscape conditions)
If the regional cuisine is not from that region but from another region than the name of the other region has to be added to the regional cuisine to make clear that the cuisines region is not of the local region of course .
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