While for the last decade Athens has been struggling with the impact of the ongoing economic crisis, which has also brought up some big questions regarding Greece’s self-identity and the country’s place within Europe, the hard times have also helped spark a process of rediscovery, with Greeks taking a new look at their own identity, their own resources and – most importantly – their own culinary traditions and heritage.

Look at Bangkok through the lens of Instagram, a travel article, or a listings website, and these days the city’s restaurant scene can appear to be all about Michelin stars. Yet look at Bangkok from ground level, and you’ll see a very different picture. The curry shacks, noodle stalls, legacy restaurants, and street vendors that have shaped the city’s dining scene for decades continue to put out some of the best value, casual, unselfconscious, full-flavored, delicious food on earth, all while blissfully unaware of a French tire manufacturer’s rating system. Michelin may have grabbed peoples’ attention, but this has added to, rather than taken away from, Bangkok’s food scene.

Barcelona today has a well-developed and strongly rooted Catalan culinary scene, something that wasn’t true a few decades back. In that sense, the reclamation of Catalan identity in the post-Franco era has not just been a political endeavor but also a culinary one.

Bilbao may not be as picturesque as its neighbor San Sebastián, with whom it maintains an unspoken rivalry. But it has an undeniable energy, a current running beneath its surface that’s impossible to contain. Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, a Bilbao native, once called it a “strong and anxious town” filled with “ambitious merchants.” He wrote those words in 1908, and even today, the city exudes that same restless drive, which always seems to end up at its bars and tables.

It might look far on the map – and getting here can seem like a journey – but the real challenge with Buenos Aires is leaving once you’re here. A port city nestled in the southern tip of South America, it never struggled to charm: it’s magnetic, layered, and endlessly fascinating, and its culinary scene is no exception.

In Guadalajara, every sidewalk, corner, garage, vacant lot, food cart, car wash, and even bicycle has the potential to become a food stand – a restaurant just waiting to happen. But what truly sets our city’s gastronomy apart is its contradictions. It’s both stubborn and traditional, yet constantly evolving. It belongs to no one, and everyone. It’s both sacred and profane because, while locals take their recipes seriously, they’re not afraid to push boundaries and bring them to unexpected places.

Though we’ve witnessed changes, many things remain intact. The city is still a simmering synthesis of delicacies and delights from all over, many of which are within a convenient arm’s length. If we have an inkling for Erzurum’s çağ kebabı, Trabzon’s kuymak, Adana’s bicibici, Mersin’s tantuni, or Hatay’s humus, we know where to go, and we can be certain beyond a reasonable doubt that the person making the object of our desire in that particular moment isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The Portuguese capital seems to have gone overnight from being a sleepy, almost forgotten city of crumbling buildings on the edge of Europe to a crowded tourist destination and a hotspot for property developers. The rapid change couldn’t be more jarring for Lisbon locals: It was as if Lisboetas had woken up from an exceptionally long slumber to find out that while they had been sleeping the rest of the world had suddenly become interested in their country and – as importantly – its food.

In a metropolis encompassing 88 cities and a near infinite number of neighborhoods, the culinary tapestry of Los Angeles is united by more treasures, currents and paradoxes than the city has freeway exits. It is an ever-fluctuating ecosystem sustained by immigrant enclaves offering genuine tastes of the home cooking and celebratory feasts they feel homesick for. It’s where first-generation sons and daughters aren’t afraid to shatter all the rules.

Walk down the street in Marseille and you are as likely to find men in djelabas sipping Moroccan mint tea at sidewalk tables as you are to find pastis – Provence’s definitive drink – poured in neighborhood bars. This multicultural montage is a reminder that Marseille’s identity is influenced as much by France as it is by the other side of the Mediterranean.

Mexico City’s culinary identity is certainly changing, thanks in large part to the boom in tourism. Yet this is only the most recent factor to shape how Mexico City is eating; shifting demographics, urbanization, property development, international economic policies and the ebb and flow of crime in the city have all molded a dining scene that is, on the one hand, catering to foreign tastes while, on the other, elevating traditional Mexican cooking techniques and dishes that were considered old-fashioned. Like Mexico City itself, the Mexican capital’s food scene is caught between several opposing forces: convenience versus slow cooking, home-grown versus imported, tradition versus innovation.

Traditions are still everything in Naples. The city prides itself on San Marzano tomatoes, which are grown nearby and are considered by many to be the best in the world, as well as the finest Lacryma Christi vines, ripened by stroking sea winds and the sun beating down on Vesuvius. The region produces the creamiest buffalo mozzarella in the world and grows its own indigenous broccoli, called friarelli. Cultivation methods are written into law to regulate producers, making it impossible to cut corners on quality. This abundance of produce then finds its way from fertile volcanic soil into the neighborhood markets, and locals take it home and cook it with care according to ancient recipes.

For a city of its size – tiny by contemporary American standards – New Orleans casts a very long shadow when it comes to things culinary. And when it comes to foodways and drinking culture, the city stands firm even as it playfully winks at you. It’s a series of living cultural stories that, like the hearty yet feather-light po’ boy, is well worth digging into.

Oaxaca's deep culinary heritage is, like in many places, a result of its geography: a big valley formed by small ones, all surrounded by mountains, rich soil and warm weather. In fact, this valley reminds us of a clay pot, much like the kind used to make the area’s signature dish, mole, in which many ingredients are mixing, aging and melting together to become something new over the heat of the fire.

In a fairly formal and reserved country, Osaka feels funky and laidback. That is reflected in the endless options for a quick delicious bite, but it’s the people, Osakans, who set the stage, and they are boisterous welcoming hosts. Belly up to a standing bar or settle into a tiny izakaya and you can expect to be engaged. For us, that always elevates the culinary experience to a higher level.

Sicily has a millennial history that has integrated many different cultures, and Palermo’s culinary scene is the highest expression of this. Here, each dish is not only a simple assemblage of different ingredients, but a living story that wants to be told and savored. Traditional Sicilian cuisine was born from the food of the poor, made from the scraps that the nobles threw away. From this, necessity has been made a virtue; from poverty, the richness of gastronomic creativity has blossomed. This can still be seen today, in the home-style cooking of the old downtown eateries, the sizzling grills of the city’s street food, the sugary assortment of Sicilian pastries.

The French are masters of creating culinary traditions and just as fervently overthrowing them – the perpetual coup d’état. Stodgy, dairy-laden Escoffier cooking gave way to bright, veggie-forward nouvelle cuisine, which eventually morphed into the rise of neo-bistros and bistronomy. In Paris today, dining has reached the next level, as if figurative art gave way to abstraction. The rules for restaurants have disappeared. Anything goes.

Porto’s homegrown cooking continues to survive in a way that mirrors the image of the river Douro that runs through the city: certain of its origins and (almost always) faithful to its path. There are certainly obstacles in the way, from flashy culinary trends to unbridled tourism, but traditional cuisine continues to flow forth, helped along by the fact that offering the “authentic” has become good business. The recipe for long-term success still remains elusive, for both the most old-school spots and the most gourmet chefs, and the city is still looking for the balance between staying true to tradition and opening the door to a new world of gastronomy. But we tripeiros will continue to have a stomach, as the Portuguese expression goes, for these changes, as long as there are still places for restaurants to open and affordable (and maybe even finger-soiling) meals to be had.

For culinary explorers, Queens is not merely a way station, it is a destination in itself. The largest in area of the five boroughs of New York City, Queens is the home of well over two million people, half of them born outside the United States, speaking untold hundreds of mother tongues. During the course of a day, you might hear a dozen languages without breaking a sweat. The gastronomic variety is perhaps even more astonishing. Queens embraces innumerable small neighborhoods within neighborhoods, and no single cuisine or family of cuisines holds sway in them all. The local favorites in food and drink, and the favorite ways to enjoy them, seem to change before your eyes every time you turn a corner.

Rio is a city that cuts no corners when it comes to making its grub gostoso, which, in Portuguese, is used both to mean “tasty” and as a typical pick-up line to call someone attractive. If – as is popularly said here – God is Brazilian, Rio would be its Garden of Eden, brimming with the fruits of temptation.

To live in San Sebastian is, in fact, to end up a bit spoiled: to eat seasonal food cooked from scratch and with such culinary craft behind it becomes normal (if you know where to go, of course). Even the daily lunch specials common around town show what great food can be all about: seasonal ingredients, subtle intervention, mastery in little details, great flavor, love for the perfect texture, and a little joy.

The sheer variety of dining opportunities in Seoul make it a paradise for curious eaters. Consider Michelin-starred speakeasy-type ten-seaters to rowdy tent bars serving fried eels, market stalls serving world-famous savory pancakes to the latest fad in donuts, throw in barbecue, dumpling joints, an abundance of fresh oysters, and knock-your-socks-off fried chicken and you’re barely scratching the surface of this venerable chow town.

In 2017, Shanghai’s longest-running open-air market at Tangjiawan Lu, which had provided the neighborhood with fresh produce, fish and seasonal foodstuffs for almost 115 years, shuttered its doors. The market and much of the area around the Laoximen metro station were some of the last historical (albeit run-down) structures in an otherwise central area full of expensive new residences. Construction has already begun on the entire city block’s worth of high-rises being built in its place, and the surrounding blocks – like many of Shanghai’s backstreets – are on notice, as the wrecking balls and construction crews continue to reshape the urban landscape at an incredibly fast rate.

Tbilisi is a melting pot of a little over one million people. It’s a collision of modern and ancient, neither Europe nor Asia – singularly “Tbilisi” where tradition is the overriding theme. Walk down a given street and you will smell the seductive aroma of fresh bread wafting out of old cellar bakeries, baked in cylindrical ovens just like it always has. Listen to the refrain of “matzoni, matzoni,” being sung by women lugging bags packed with jars of the fresh sour yogurt at eight in the morning in every neighborhood.

A metropolis of nearly 14 million people, Tokyo is unashamedly trendy and rapidly matches the taste of its modern urbanites. Acutely attuned to the dining scene in New York, it’s only ever a few paces behind importing the latest fashionable gastronomy. Indeed, the country has a long history of doing so. When Japan finally opened its borders to the outside world in 1868, it was quick to develop and embrace yoshoku – its own versions of Western classics – such as hamburg, hamburger patties topped with Japanese-style demi-glace sauce or the more bizarre Napolitan which adds Japanese green peppers and frankfurters into a ketchup spaghetti mix. While much of this kind of cooking is now distinctly uncool – the preserve of smoky cafeterias one’s grandfather might visit, newspaper tucked under one arm – culinary creativeness continues unabated.