About gustale.recipes

Gustale is an open culinary encyclopedia — a living archive of the world's dishes, written by the people who cook and eat them.

What we cover

Every dish in the archive has an origin, a method, a story. We document each with care for provenance: where it comes from, how it's traditionally prepared, the regional variations that make it worth knowing. A dish isn't just a recipe — it's a piece of culture with a place on a map.

How the archive works

Gustale follows a read-everyone, write-credentialed model — the same approach that powers Wikipedia. Anyone can browse the catalogue, read every article, and explore dishes by country. Editing and creating entries requires a free account; publishing changes is gated by a small group of moderators who review drafts for accuracy and citation.

Every claim in a published article is meant to be citable. Where sources exist, they're linked. Where they don't, the article is marked as a draft until the evidence is in.

The stack

Gustale is built on a Fastify + PostgreSQL/PostGIS backend, an Astro + React front-end, and a Wikipedia-style moderation pipeline. The world map uses MapLibre GL with the globe projection; dish pages render each origin geographically so you can see at a glance where a dish belongs. Media (photos, scans of historical sources) is served from an S3-compatible store so the archive can grow without bloating the database.

Get involved

New here? Create an account and start drafting your favourite dish. Every contribution goes through review before it appears on the live archive — there's no rush, and there's no penalty for asking questions in your draft notes.

Gustale is an independent project by Alejandro and collaborators in Bali. Source code and contribution guidelines are maintained in the project repository.