Some cuisines establish themselves in new countries within a generation while others remain confined to their communities for far longer. The difference is largely structural rather than a matter of how good the food is.
Ingredients have to be substitutable
A cuisine built on ingredients that grow in one climate cannot be reproduced elsewhere until trade catches up, which can take decades.
Cuisines that survive relocation are usually those where the character comes from technique and seasoning, so a local vegetable or cut can stand in without the dish collapsing.
The dishes that spread first from any cuisine tend to be precisely those with the least specific ingredient list, regardless of whether they are considered representative at home.
Technique has to survive being learned quickly
A cuisine that depends on long apprenticeship spreads only as fast as trained cooks can be produced, which is slow and geographically limited.
Where the core methods can be taught in weeks, a restaurant can hire locally and expand, and the cuisine becomes available in places no cook from its homeland has settled.
This is why cuisines centred on quick cooking over high heat, or on assembly from prepared components, appear abroad more widely than those built on slow specialist work.
A portable format matters more than the recipe
Food that can be eaten standing, carried, or served without cutlery fits into contexts where unfamiliar food is first encountered.
That first encounter is usually casual and inexpensive rather than a formal meal, so cuisines with a strong handheld or single-bowl format have an obvious entry point.
Cuisines whose meals are structured as many shared dishes lack that entry point, and often arrive later and in a simplified form that misrepresents them.
One dish usually carries the rest
Adoption tends to run through a single dish that becomes widely known and then acts as a doorway to everything else on the menu.
That dish is rarely the one a home cook would nominate, since it is selected by how easily it can be explained and produced rather than by its standing at home.
The cuisine's reputation abroad is then shaped by that dish for a long time, which is why so many cuisines are known for something peripheral to them.
A resident community accelerates everything
Where people from a cuisine's home region settle in numbers, they create demand that supports importers, and those importers then supply restaurants serving everyone else.
The supply chain built for a community therefore becomes the infrastructure through which the cuisine reaches a wider public.
Without that base, a cuisine depends on general wholesalers and remains limited to whatever they happen to stock, which caps how faithfully it can be cooked.