Know Us By Our Trail Food (d20 Cuisine Generator)

As an additional tool for city building, cuisine is a nice one - certainly nothing makes a city memorable like the entire food economy being based around an odd local crop or reflecting an unusual local taste.

As adventurers are typically new to town, the partys experience of a city is going to be through tavern fare and street food rather than food in the home. There are any number of fantasy tavern fare generators our there so let us consider that angle covered and focus on street food.

To figure out what combination of food makes this place interesting, we take six categories.
1. Vegetables
2. Grain
3. Fruits
4. Protein
5. Dairy
6. Sweets/Oils

Roll a d20 for each to get local abundance. 15 and up, this category is omni-present, more or less everything you will get served features this. Less than 5, this is rare, doesn't appear much around here and will not be typically seen. Rank them by the actual number to get relative popularity. If you need ideas for interesting protein, a couple of random picks from the Monster Manual appendices for animals works well. Tone down the lethality if it is something particularly fierce (maybe an giant chicken in place of an axe-beak). If sweets/oils comes top, then the second most popular category can be the medium to carry it - bread dipped in oil, sugared fruits, deep-fried beastie, etc.

Whichever of these things scored highest as a category is the staple of the place - what food-carts and stalls on every corner serve. It will be often flavoured with other things but as a quick 'what is the street seller peddling' you can go with this.

For things more complex and long lasting than 'what is the go-to quick meal' - make some rolls on the preservation techniques to see what 'long lasting food' is typically available. This could be trail rations but also for snacks likely found in the hands of NPCs. I am keeping in all the strange modern techniques like blast freezing, assuming that either some strange beast or a friendly local spell-slinger is brought to bear to make things like blast-freezing or high-pressure preservation happen.

d20 preservation techniques
1. Aspic / confit - cooking then sealing around with fat
2. Blast chilling
3. Brining - stored in salt-water
4. Burying
5. Canning - also counts for jars or other sealed vessel
6. Curing - a mix of salt, sugar and other elements to preseve
7. Drying - typically in the sun
8. Fermenting
9. High pressure
10. Jam-making
11. Jugging (seal in gravy)
12. Lye treatment
13. Modified Atmosphere
14. Pickling
15. Plasma
16. Potting (seal in liquid)
17. Radiation
18. Salting
19. Smoking
20. Candying / storing in honey

Mash it all together to get your distinct local style

Test Case: Lost City cuisine starts with protein (locusts, crocodile, eels), warm weather fruits, and vegetables (an edible reed, cucumbers and tomatoes). This is combined with 4 base preservation techniques of sun-drying, pickling in fruit-spirits or fruit-vinegar, preserving in honey and a special fermentation that lets the local giant spiders cocoon and liquefy things then chase them off before they can drain it. Mainly notable for the pride lost city locals take in how counter-intuitive their combinations of how they preserve what are. Among the best long-lasting warm weather trail food, if you can acquire the taste.

Further inspiration - try this random street food photoset generator or read the wikipedia article on food prep techniques or try Random Table of the Weeks coincidentally released Local Delicacies generator.