Belgian food is light-years ahead of any other Old World cuisine, because unlike cuisines that rest on fussy authenticity to a norm created long ago, its values are playfulness and change. There are craft beers that taste like cherries or are spiced with Persian fragrances. Mussels done four ways in a single pot. Boxes of praline chocolates in which every single chocolate tastes different. Fast-food pita bars better than most of our fine restaurants, combining Greek and Moroccan influences. While Belgian food maintains every bit of Europe's high quality standards, it is simultaneously unpretentious and unself-conscious; it has its arms frankly and joyfully open to the world. And nothing encapsulates that ethos more than Belgian frites, or fries.

Most agree that fries were created in Belgium. (The moniker "french fries" reflects a mistake wrought on the fry art form by confused American GIs.) The basic Belgian fry is relatively thick cut, craggy and deeply potatoey and is fried twice in beef tallow, yielding a supercrunchy, umami-rich outside and an impossibly soft, sweet, silky inside. You could eat these fries plain all day, served as they usually are in Belgium from a food truck or a frietkot, or fry shack, in a little newsprint cone.

But the true glory of Belgian fries — the thing that makes me dream forlornly of them while traveling in places that now seem to me boring, changeless food deserts like France and Italy — are the sauces. These sauces are explosions of multicultural creativity. No self-respecting frietkot offers fewer than 30 sauces to choose from to accompany its fries. There's aioli, fresh and sharp and garlicky. Pepper sauce. Curry mayonnaise. Curry ketchup. Sauce andalouse (tomatoes and peppers). Sauce americaine (chervil, onions and capers). Mammoet (tomato and soy sauce). Harissa. Pickle sauce. Samurai sauce (a tart Asian remoulade). Diablo. Lemon parmesan. Brandy mayonnaise. Zigeuner sauce (bell peppers and Hungarian paprika). The sauces come in little dollops on your paper cone.

Whenever you travel to Belgium, you see new sauces on offer at the frietkots that reflect new world-food discoveries, like Cambodian and Malaysian flavors. Lots of the sauces boldly marry one ethnicity with another, just as we are doing as a human race. Who wants food policed by cultural gatekeepers? Forget about that. The Belgian frietkot proprietors know the secret that our mournful world-in-decline philosophers don't yet see: The best is yet to come.