Street Foods on UNESCO's Heritage List, Ranked by Year
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UNESCO's best-known list is for places like temples and old towns. A second list covers living traditions, and over the past fifteen years food has become one of its biggest themes. Several of the dishes now on it are things you can buy on the street for a few dollars.
We ranked seven of them by the year UNESCO added them to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The oldest listing comes first. Traditional Mexican cuisine joined in 2010, one of the first food traditions ever listed. The newest is Egypt's koshari, added in December 2025.
One thing to know before you read on: UNESCO doesn't list recipes. It lists the practices around a food, such as the skills, the sellers, and the way people share it. That's why the entries have names like 'the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo' and 'hawker culture in Singapore'.
How we ranked: Criterion: the year each element was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, as given on its official page at ich.unesco.org (checked October 2026). We chose food traditions you can eat on the street or at a simple market stall, with one per country. Caveats: UNESCO inscribes practices and know-how, not single dishes, so each entry covers more than the dish in the photo. Some entries are shared between countries (cassava bread is listed jointly for five). Other food traditions listed in 2010 include the French gastronomic meal and the Mediterranean diet, which we left out because they are not street foods. The list grows every December, so this ranking will change.
#7EgyptKoshari: UNESCO since 2025 · Egypt's first dish on the list
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Koshari joined the list in December 2025. It was the first Egyptian dish UNESCO had inscribed. It's a cheap, filling mix of rice, pasta and black lentils, topped with tomato sauce, chickpeas and crispy fried onions. UNESCO's listing names the street carts and the craftspeople who build and decorate them. In Cairo you'll find it at dedicated koshari shops and carts, especially near schools and busy streets.
#6VenezuelaCassava bread: UNESCO since 2024 · Shared by five countries
Photo: Rosa García (CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Cassava bread was inscribed in 2024 as a joint listing for Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras and Venezuela. The tuber is grated and pressed dry, and the flour is cooked on a hot griddle into big, thin rounds. Its roots go back to Indigenous Caribbean cooks. In eastern Venezuela, markets sell casabe in stacks, eaten plain or with cheese.
Ceebu jën, Senegal's rice-and-fish dish, was inscribed in 2021. Fish stuffed with a garlic-parsley paste simmers with tomato and vegetables, and the rice is then cooked in that broth. UNESCO traces it to the fishing communities of Saint-Louis. It's Senegal's classic lunch, served from big shared platters.
#4SingaporeHawker food: UNESCO since 2020 · Singapore's first entry
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Singapore's hawker culture was inscribed in December 2020, the country's first entry on the list. The listing covers the whole system of hawker centres, where many cooks, each with their own stall, feed the city cheaply under one roof. Hainanese chicken rice is one of the classic orders, at centres such as Maxwell Food Centre.
#3Naples, ItalyPizza: UNESCO since 2017 · Art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo
Photo: KKPCW (CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo was inscribed in December 2017. The listing covers the pizza maker's craft, from working the dough to baking it in a wood-fired oven. On the streets of Naples, try pizza a portafoglio, a small pizza folded into quarters and eaten on the go.
#2UzbekistanPlov: UNESCO since 2016 · Palov culture and tradition · inscribed 2016
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Uzbekistan's palov (plov) culture and tradition was inscribed in 2016, the same year Tajikistan's oshi palav was listed separately. Rice, meat, carrots and whole heads of garlic cook together in a huge kazan cauldron that can feed hundreds. In Tashkent, plov centres serve it from giant pots at lunchtime.
Traditional Mexican cuisine was inscribed in 2010, one of the first food traditions on the list. The listing takes Michoacán as its model, and it rests on corn, beans and chili and names tortillas and tamales. Corundas, Michoacán's own tamales, are cooked wrapped in a corn leaf and sold by the dozen at the state's markets and snack stalls.
