What's for dinner: Kiwis' favourite cuisines revealed

Thai food takes out the top spot for international cuisine in New Zealand. Photo / 123rf

Kiwis' appreciation for different cuisines, from Thai to Middle Eastern to Italian, has come a long way from the staple meat and veg our grandparents cooked.

Now a new report, based on Google trends data, has revealed the most popular international cuisines in New Zealand.

The data doesn't just reveal Kiwis' dining-out habits, but also shows that we're eating at home more often.

The data for each cuisine is comprised of the thousands of searches related to the topic: for example, Japanese cuisine will include searches for Japanese restaurants, sushi, recipes, and even the names of local Japanese restaurants.

Google then counts how often the search terms are used in countries, regions, and towns and allocates a popularity score to see what percentage of people in different areas are eating particular cuisines.

The data ranks the most popular international cuisines according to region. Photo / Supplied

The top five international cuisines Kiwis enjoy are, in order: Thai, Indian, Chinese, Italian and Japanese. Read more about the rankings here.

The popularity of Thai food isn't because of the number of Thai restaurants - there are far more Chinese and Indian restaurants in the country. The report concludes that this means more Kiwis are choosing to create Thai dishes at home from scratch.

Thai and Chinese are the top favourite cuisines in Canterbury according to the data, while Indian is the cuisine of choice for Hawke's Bay.

Italian food is most popular in Wellington, while Auckland's go-to is Japanese, which is unsurprising - there are 538 Japanese restaurants in the region, leaving Aucklanders spoiled for choice.