Istanbul

Istanbul's Spring Foods: The Wild Ones

Spring arrives at the markets in Istanbul with a great deal of color and fanfare. Vendors arrange peas in perfect diagonal rows, displaying their goods to lure you into a multi-kilo purchase. Men furiously carve out artichoke hearts and toss them into lemon-water-filled bags, step around massive piles of trimmings and hand you what feels like a new goldfish purchase. Fava beans are ubiquitous in their fuzzy pods, although less appealing because of all the prep work that comes with them. Best to enjoy fava beans in a restaurant, zeytinyağlı-style (with olive oil) and or in our favorite preparation, a garlicky mash like the chefs make at Müzedechanga in the Sabancı Museum.

Mexico City

Mercado de Medellín: Smiles (and Provisions) by the Kilo

In Mexico, marketplaces have been the soul of communities for millennia, and of the many modern-day ones we’ve visited in Mexico City, the one we’re always most excited to return to is Mercado Medellín in Roma Sur. Recently, we visited with a guide, an American expat who gets her produce and meat there every week and could get us the inside scoop. Our first stop was La Sorpresa butchery. Arturo, the owner, shook our hands and continued breaking down a large piece of beef for a special delivery. He told us that his family has run La Sorpresa inside the market for 25 years. The meat they sell comes from different slaughterhouses in the country, and even from the United States.

Rio

Brazilian Craft Beer: Land of the Rising Suds

Editor's Note: Sadly, these spots are closed now. In February, the Rio state assembly took an unprecedented measure and passed tax breaks for microbreweries that produce less than 6 million liters of craft beer a year. We don’t actually endorse such foregoing of public funds in a place like Rio, where a recent survey found 28,000 elementary schoolchildren to be illiterate and where a responsible young woman is told in a public health clinic that it will take her four months to get an appointment for an STD test.

Shanghai

Palace Duck: Under Pressure

Some people argue that it’s not KFC’s secret blend of 11 herbs and spices that makes their fried chicken so successful, but rather the cooking technique. Deep-frying the chickens in a pressure cooker saved on oil and time in the 1930s, making the crispy bone-in chicken a feasible option for fast-food chains. Until this new gizmo became popular, the fast-food industry was almost exclusively made up of quick-serve burgers and fries.

Barcelona

First Stop: Anya von Bremzen's Barcelona

Editor’s note: We asked writer Anya von Bremzen where she heads first for food when she arrives in Barcelona. She is the winner of three James Beard awards, a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure and the author of five cookbooks, including the recently published Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing.Most Barcelona tapas haunts, old and new, pay homage to the bares de producto, the astounding ingredient-laden kioskos (dining stalls) of the buoyant Boquería market. It might be crowded and touristy but on my first morning in town, Boquería is still my Holy Grail. The best time to go? Around 10:30 a.m., when the stalls are less crowded between lunch and dinner. Right by its entrance, I stop to pay my respects to the legendary chickpea-and-butifarra sausage stew at Pinotxo. Its owner, the venerable Juanito Bayen, is now nearing 80 but looking dapper as ever in his satin vest and bow tie. Juanito is still a maestro of counter banter, spiking coffee with brandy for dour resident fishmongers, plying Japanese tourists with pristine razor clams, smiling for cameras next to Ferran Adrià.

Istanbul

CB on the Road: Getting Souped Up at Gaziantep's Metanet

It is impossible to sleep late in Gaziantep, despite the tranquility of the historic quarter, the calming, hunker-in-and-go-back-to-sleep effect of the hotel room’s thick stone walls and the comforting, dusty smell of antique furniture. Even the promise of a nice breakfast spread served between 7:30 and 10 a.m. could not keep us from hitting this ancient southeastern Turkish city’s streets. At 6 a.m., we were rambling through Gaziantep’s coppersmiths’ bazaar. As we walked by, the metal shutters of spice shops were thrown open in a clattering roar, whooshing an aromatic cloud into our path. Street sweepers worked their beat with twiggy, homemade-looking brooms as groups of shopkeepers lingered over the first of many more teas and smokes at the corner çayhane. Exiting another artery of covered bazaars, we stepped out into bright morning light, which shot through the brooms of street sweepers at rest, creating crazy mangrove-like shadows on the sidewalk. We were close now, so close we could smell it.

Barcelona

Spring Fever: Seasonal Market Foods in Barcelona

The reach of globalization and industrial agriculture is such that you can find pretty much any kind of vegetable all year long at markets throughout Spain, but there are a still a few holdouts that arrive at very specific times of the year, and only for a fleeting moment. This is the produce we look out for, along with signs indicating the precise provenance. Artichokes from El Prat and the Ebro Delta are nearing the end of their all-too-brief visit, while the rare strawberries and wonderful peas of Maresme, on the coast of Barcelona province, have just begun appearing at market stalls. Others, such as the humble fava, arrive with less heralding but are no less welcome.

Mexico City

Rick's Picks: Bayless's Mexico City Favorites

Editor’s note: Award-winning cookbook author, chef-restaurateur and television personality Rick Bayless is a renowned expert on Mexican cooking and a frequent traveler to Mexico City. He recently shared with us his list of must-visit places in Condesa, Roma/Roma Norte and Polanco.

Shanghai

Chinese Food Idioms: Killing the Chicken to Show the Monkey

In a country where the traditional way to greet someone translates to “Have you eaten yet?” (你吃了吗? Nǐ chīle ma?), it should come as no surprise that food idioms permeate everyday language in China. Chinese culture also prizes indirectness, so idioms are the perfect way to portray deep meaning without being overt. Frustrating for cross-cultural businessmen and language students or not, chengyu (成语), the ever-present four character idioms, and xiyu (习语), which are generally longer, are often the source of the hilariously mistranslated Chinglish you still see on street signs and menus today.

Rio

Bar Imaculada: Old Rio, Reconceived

Editor's Note: Sadly, this spot is now closed. The locals of the Morro da Conceição are a proud bunch, and with good reason. To the north the cargo and cruise ships of Rio’s Port Zone steam in and steam out of Guanabara Bay. To their south the centro overflows with working cariocas during commercial hours. By evening, the centro becomes sparsely populated stretches of concrete and highway. The residents of Morro da Conceição have witnessed Rio history on its various sides.

Mexico City

First Stop: Julie Doherty Meade's Mexico City

Editor’s note: We asked Brooklyn-based writer Julie Doherty Meade where she heads first for food when she arrives in Mexico City. Meade is the author of Moon San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, and the Bajío, Moon Living Abroad in Mexico, Moon Metro New York City, and the upcoming sixth edition of Moon Mexico City.

Shanghai

Tao Heung: Dim Sum Import

Girdled by the South China Sea, the islands and peninsula that make up Hong Kong have had to grow up rather than out. This geographical constraint has resulted in more than twice as many skyscrapers as any other city in the world (1,251 and counting), and many of those high-rises house malls jam-packed with some of the best restaurants in the city. Now the trend of dining out amongst designer shops is heading north to Shanghai, as developers erect facsimiles of Hong Kong’s favorite malls on both sides of the Huangpu River. At IAPM, the latest shopping spot stocked with HK brands to open its doors to Shanghai, it seems fitting that Tao Heung is one of the most popular spots in the foodie and shopping mecca.

Barcelona

Spanish Food Idioms: Going Full Milk

You are what you eat, as the saying goes. Is it any surprise, then, that food figures so largely in popular culture all over the world? In Spain, we have a veritable cornucopia of food-related expressions. Here’s a taste: Dar una torta, “to give a cake.” To slap someone. But darse una torta, “give a cake to yourself,” means you hit something else. It’s a mild, lighthearted expression, even with tortazo, which is a bigger biff, and comes from the funny old circus setup where a clown throws a cake into the face of another clown.

Istanbul

Erol Lokantası: The Un-Tourist Trap

(Editor's Note: We regret to report that this establishment is no longer open.) Şenol Erol is trying to remain optimistic about running the last esnaf lokantası in Sultanahmet, where the market seems to demand tourist traps over traditional tradesmen’s restaurants. “I guess that makes us unique, doing things the old way,” he says, as if this vintage eatery needed a tagline.

Istanbul

First Stop: Aslı Aydıntaşbaş's Istanbul

Editor’s note: We asked Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, a columnist for Turkish daily Milliyet, where she heads first for food when she returns to Istanbul after a trip abroad. Aydıntaşbaş is also a commentator on CNNTürk’s show “Karşı Gündem” and has written for numerous publications, including the former International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes and Newsweek. Funny enough, I don't really crave Turkish food if I have been spending time out of the country. This is because, for starters, I am a foodie: I crave things. I schlep to the other side of town for a meal. I never hesitate to spend money on good restaurants.

Barcelona

Bar Mundial: Heavyweight Champ

The perpetually packed Bar Mundial is one of Barcelona’s elder statesmen. It opened for business in Santa Caterina-El Born in 1914 under the name Bodega La Chispa, and was rechristened with its current name in 1925, when the Tort family took over. The place is now run by third-generation owner Paco Tort. The old bar has history, that’s for sure – even El Chispa ("Spark"), the bartender, is a 30-year veteran of the place. And what keeps people coming back to Bar Mundial are the delightful seafood tapas, classic and contemporary, that issue from the tiny kitchen.

Mexico City

El Beso Huasteco: Eastern Promises

Editor's Note: Sadly, this spot is now closed. La Huasteca, a region in Mexico that extends through several eastern states, including San Luis Potosí, Veracruz, Tamaulipas, Hidalgo, Querétaro and Puebla, gets its name from the pre-Hispanic civilization that inhabited the area. There are still some indigenous Huastec communities that live in the region, and like those of the rest of the country, their local food and customs have been highly influenced by the Spanish conquest and the influx of immigrants both domestic and international.

Istanbul

Spring (Food) Break 2014: Istanbul

With all of the anticipation of local elections in March, the scandalous graft-laden tapes leaked via social media, the communication fog brought on by the ban of Twitter and YouTube and the subsequent call for a vote recount in many cities, this city's stomach had good reason to be distracted. But one cannot survive on a diet of daily news alone. In case you all forgot, Spring is here.

Athens

First Stop: Peter Minakis's Athens

Editor’s note: For our First Stop series, we asked Toronto blogger Peter Minakis, who writes about Greek cooking and dining at Kalofagas, where he heads first for food when he arrives in Athens. Minakis is the author of The Everything Mediterranean Cookbook and his latest book, The Big Book of Mediterranean Recipes, is due out by the end of April.

Mexico City

Best Thing Since Sliced Bread: Mexico City's Top 5 Torterías

Taquerías are probably the most common kind of eatery in Mexico City, but torterías, purveyors of tortas, the generously filled sandwiches that come on bolillo rolls or the smaller teleras, are not far behind. From stalls at subway station exits to restaurants that have been in business close to a century, torterías are a fixture in the city landscape. Here are five of our favorites, in no particular order:

Rio

Mercadão de Madureira: From Live Animals to Dead Souls

For the carioca in need of grains in bulk, cheap party decorations, live animals and herbs for the ritual baths practiced in Afro-Brazilian faiths, the Mercadão de Madureira offers one-stop shopping. Madureira is a good two-hour bus ride from tourist-zone Ipanema and is tucked behind hills far from the ocean breeze, which means the neighborhood heats up even more than already steamy Rio. In the heart of Rio’s working-class north zone, the Mercadão is where cariocas who count every real go to comparison-shop and haggle for the best deals in the city limits. Remember that the minimum wage in Rio is less than 800 reais (about US$330) per month, and a middle-class family is defined as earning above US$450 per month. That means the 100-real meals of Ipanema are hardly palatable for the so-called “new middle class.” Despite the cheery BRIC emerging-economy narrative and the olho grande (“big eye,” or greed) of investors looking for a new consumer market, this sector of Brazilian society can be better understood as the working poor.

Istanbul

Erzincan Tandır Ekmeği: Village Loaves for City Folks

In the Kurtuluş district of Istanbul, we’ve lately been exploring links to older, nearly lost Istanbul culinary traditions. Spending time in the sweetshops, milk bars and şarküteri of this district, we’ve seen a glimmer, if faded, of the “Old Istanbul” that people remember from the 1950s and '60s, when the city’s historic minorities – Greeks, Armenians and Jews – played a prominent role in the culinary scene of the city. It’s a complex and endlessly fascinating subject, one that never fails to spark our curiosity. And then we were distracted by the smell of fresh bread. Fresh lavaş, to be more specific, being hoisted out of a fiery hole in the floor on a blackened hook by the sturdy Gül Hanım.

Shanghai

Zhaojialou Water Town: Snack Street Field Trip

For visitors looking to get beyond Shanghai’s urban core, among the main attractions are the plentiful water towns that ring the outer suburbs in just about every direction. The name refers to the bygone reliance of these towns on water for irrigation and transport, especially in the form of canals. Billed as ancient villages, the popular destinations tend to be packed with visitors, with traditional foods as the main draw – perhaps due in part to the lack of other activities on offer.

Barcelona

Museu de la Xocolata: Chocolate City

In the weeks leading up to Easter, Barcelona looks like an extension of Willy Wonka’s factory-fun house: chocolate castles, houses, animals, cars, motorbikes and even cartoon characters and fútbol celebrities fashioned out of cacao populate the city’s traditional patisseries. Catalonian confectioners expect to sell some 600,000 chocolate sculptures decorated with yellow chicks, chocolate eggs and cakes studded with hard-boiled eggs and colored feathers this year. The last are known as monas, and godparents traditionally give these to their godchildren throughout Catalonia and other parts of Spain to mark the holiday.

Shanghai

Old Jesse: The Inside Track to a Guidebook Favorite

Ask a Shanghainese person for the best běnbāng, or local, restaurant in town, and you’ll probably be pointed toward Old Jesse. The doyenne of haipai cuisine, this ramshackle restaurant is the darling of the guidebook industry, with mentions in publications from Travel + Leisure to Lonely Planet, but that doesn’t mean that it’s foreigner-friendly. In fact, when LP first published their listing back in 2008, Old Jesse stopped taking reservations in English for some time, just to spite the hordes of tourists vying for a seat in their tiny former French Concession establishment. Even now, the lingua franca in the packed dining room is Shanghainese, and it’s still not uncommon for a laowai’s reservations to disappear if he or she is just a few minutes late, or for foreigners to have to watch hungrily as the dishes they ordered come out to tables manned by locals first, even though said locals were seated long after them.

Athens

Greek Food Idioms: Turning Sour Grapes into Honey

With its rich, profound history – its roots lie in epics and at the foundation of modern civilization, after all – the Greek language is ripe for and with metaphor, particularly of the food-related variety. Folk sayings and proverbs have a prominent place in colloquial language and everyday life, and they are at turns humorous, instructive and ironic. And sometimes they are all three at once.

Mexico City

A Slice of the Action: Pizza in Mexico City

Mexico City is indisputably one of the world’s great eating capitals, and one of its main draws is the astonishing regional diversity in the Mexican cuisines that are available here. But sometimes, the only thing that’ll hit the spot is a slice of pizza. Fortunately, D.F.’s got you covered there, too. There are hundreds of pizzerias to choose from, from big chains to small family-run establishments, but these are our three favorites.

Rio

Back to the Source: Rio's Top 5 Coffee Spots

Perhaps coffee is underappreciated in Rio because it’s so plentiful. Brazil is the world’s largest producer of coffee, but both the selection and the presentation of the stuff you’ll find in Rio is hardly what a gringo dreams of in the capital country of café. Coffees here are cafezinhos, small, potent, highly sugary and with no milk. A cafezinho is taken standing up at a lanchonete (snack bar) or on a work break in the office in tiny medicine cups filled from an unseemly plastic cylinder. When Brazilians have seen the size of our morning coffee, many have expressed a concern that we could hurt ourselves with such a large quantity. (It’s just a coffee cup.)

Barcelona

Bulk Food: Culinary Inspiration, by the Kilo

Early on in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 film Amélie, the title character plunges her hand into a big sack of lentils, relishing the sensation of them slipping through her fingers, a look of pure pleasure on her face. That kind of behavior is verboten in shops that sell dry goods by weight, but buying groceries in bulk has its own inherent pleasures (and you can run your fingers through your purchases once you’re back at home). Just as with bulk wine, buying food in bulk is making a comeback in Barcelona. Not only does this practice yield less packaging waste, but in our minds, it also makes hunting for great ingredients all the more enjoyable.

Istanbul

First Stop: Ana Sortun's Istanbul

Editor’s note: In the inaugural post of our new recurring feature, First Stop, we ask Chef Ana Sortun of the much-beloved restaurant Oleana and bakery Sofra in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she heads first for food when she arrives in Istanbul. Sortun received the James Beard Foundation’s award for “Best Chef Northeast” in 2005 and wrote the cookbook Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. Her newest restaurant, Sarma, opened at the end of 2013 in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Shanghai

Move Over, Tea: Shanghai's Top 5 Coffee Shops and Roasters

China is increasingly becoming a nation of coffee drinkers, a trend that is quietly percolating out beyond the confines of cosmopolitan Shanghai and Beijing. As more and more tea terraces are converted to profitable coffee plantations in the country’s mountainous southwest regions, and with the number of Costa Coffee and Starbucks locations still on the upswing, it’s never been easier to find a decent cup of joe.

Rio

Intihuasi: Andean High

After three decades in Brazil, Margarita Sayan Pinto still speaks a charming, peppery portunhol – the Spanglish-like mix of Portuguese and Spanish – that she seems in no hurry to rid herself of. The chef remembers an interaction she had with a local taxi driver when asked to describe why she opened Rio’s first Peruvian restaurant nine years ago. "Peru?" the driver said. "That’s the only country in South America that doesn’t border Brazil." (Peru indeed has a 1,860-mile border with Brazil. Ecuador and Chile are the only South American nations that do not touch Brazil.)

Diaspora Dining: Greek Flavors Down Under

Greeks have been gravitating towards Melbourne, nestled in the southeastern corner of Australia, ever since the gold rush of the 1850s. The Greek Orthodox Community was formally founded in 1897, and the first Greek language newspaper, Australis, was issued in 1913. But it was in the 1950s and '60s, as the consequences of the civil war continued to be felt in Greece, that they really immigrated in earnest, coming in the thousands. Today Melbourne boasts the largest population of Greeks outside of mainland Greece, and the world’s third-largest Greek-speaking population after Athens and Thessaloniki.

Istanbul

Trileçe: The Balkan Cake of Mystery

It’s hard to imagine Istanbul without its pastane windows stacked high with trays of ivory-colored flaky mille-feuille and coolers lined with row after row of chocolate-topped éclairs. And of course, the sweets scene in Istanbul would not be complete without the much-loved profiterole. Generations of İstanbullu have taken pleasure in these French exotics, but at some point they became part of the local dessert canon, complete with their new Turkish ID, milföy and ekler. Their origins, their journey to Istanbul, if still relevant, have been more or less wiped clean from the memory of the city.

Athens

Rise and Dine: Athens' Top 5 Grab-and-Go Breakfasts Downtown

We know that there’s a trend away from gluten and carbs these days, and all we have to say to that is: more for us! In Athens, bread and pies still form the foundation, if the not the substance, of many a meal – breakfast especially. Make like a local and start your day off right with cheese pie or koulouri from one of our top picks. (These places are also perfect for a pick-me-up later in the day.)

Barcelona

Bar Ángel: Free-Range Pork (and Peas)

Update: This spot is sadly no longer open. There’s pork, and then there’s pork – by which we mean pastured Iberian pork from Extremadura. These native black pigs roam freely on as much as ten hectares each of dehesa, through grass and brush and under oak trees, feeding on acorns and other forage. The meat is extraordinary, tender and deeply flavorful, used to make some of the world’s best ham and among the prized ingredients at Bar Ángel in El Born.

Shanghai

Ask CB: Halal in Shanghai?

Dear Culinary Backstreets,I am a practicing Muslim and have a hard time finding halal food in Shanghai. Do you have any recommendations? Eating halal is difficult in a country whose cuisine considers pork its staple meat. Pork consumption in China - the largest consumer of the meat globally - reached record levels last year, averaging 86 pounds per capita. Since 2007, the government has operated “strategic pork reserves,” which include underground bunkers of frozen pork and live pig farms, to help regulate porcine inflation. If you pop into a wet market, you’ll see rows of pork vendors selling everything from cutlets to brains, but typically only one butcher filleting beef and lamb. Above that stall, you’ll inevitably find Arabic script and the characters: 清真 (qīngzhēn, or “halal”).

Rio

Aprazível: Paradise Found

Well-intentioned food appreciators have often made the error of believing that touristy is the opposite of authentic. The same goes for tourism and cultural exploration in general. The relentless search for the most local anything becomes based not on how locals themselves regard this thing but on how many fellow outsiders like ourselves have found it. (The fewer, the better, so goes the logic.) The localness of the thing is inverted, with the outsider becoming the arbiter of what is “authentic.” But if we, the outsiders, put so much effort into finding what is local, what’s wrong with locals making a similar effort to reach out to us?

Istanbul

Karaköy Lokantası: A Dockside Winner

When Karaköy was still “the docks” and filled with shop windows advertising boat tickets to Odessa alongside cubby-sized import and export offices, Karaköy Lokantası felt like a culinary mirage. With great food, personable service and tasteful décor, this family-operated eatery stood out, prominently, among the humble street-side eateries filled with noshing stevedores. These days, snapshots from the neighborhood could have fallen from the pages of the hipper-than-thou Monocle magazine, and Karaköy Lokantası fits in nicely with its new, trendy neighbors.

Athens

Go Fish: Athens' Top 5 Seafood Restaurants

Update: This spot is sadly no longer open. In Athens, we take full advantage of our proximity to water. An incredible variety of fresh fish and seafood go straight from the fishing nets into our pots and onto our grills. So naturally, we know a thing or two when it comes to seafood restaurants. One is the master of fried dishes, another grilled, while yet another on our short list is known for creative experimentation. What they have in common is supremely fresh seafood at a reasonable price (as well as a penchant for fishing nets as decoration, it seems). And they’re all located close to the sea – where else could they be? In no particular order:

Istanbul

Mourning in Istanbul: The Bread of Political Affliction

Since coming to Istanbul more than a decade ago, we have come to associate a loaf of the city’s iconic crusty white bread with satisfying lunches in an esnaf lokantası, using chunks of the humble loaf to sop up whatever was left on our plate. Since Tuesday, though, a loaf of bread has become something else in Istanbul: a symbol of both mourning and protest.

Barcelona

Bulk Wine: The Good Stuff, on Tap

For so long, bulk wine has been synonymous with plonk – even in a country like Spain, where buying wine straight from the barrel was standard practice up until the 1980s, when it was largely replaced by bottles with certified designations of origin. We are well acquainted with the bad stuff, which we call vino peleón, literally “scrappy” wine, but thankfully, the era of its ubiquity is mostly over and done with. It’s much easier these days to find good wine at low prices (€1 to €5 per liter) that’s suitable for everyday drinking. And another upside to this practice is the environmentally friendly packaging: your own jug.

Shanghai

CB on the Road: Xiamen's Island Flavors

A scenic highway wraps around the island city of Xiamen, allowing easy access to the mountainous interior and rocky coastline, but on the east coast the natural scenery gives way to man-made propaganda. Three-story-high characters facing the South China Sea dominate the skyline. As red as Mao’s Little Book, these towering characters proclaim “One Country, Two Systems, United China,” a stern reminder visible to the residents of Jinmen, a Taiwanese island less than 2 kilometers from the ancient port city’s shores. This sightline marks the shortest distance between the People’s Republic and the Republic, and while government policies may differ greatly depending on which side of the Taiwan Strait you call home, the food culture is remarkably similar.

Mexico City

CB on the Road: Sun and Seafood in Acapulco

Acapulco, the famed resort town of the state of Guerrero, on the Pacific side of Mexico, has been the most popular getaway destination for chilangos (slang for Mexico City residents) for generations. The proximity of this beautiful bay to the capital – it’s just a four-hour drive or 45-minute flight – makes it easy for us to spend a long weekend there partying, swimming in the ocean or just soaking up rays on the white sand beaches and doing a whole lot of nothing. While Acapulco has gotten a bad rap in recent years for drug-related crime and violence, it’s still quite safe for tourists.

Istanbul

Grills and Thrills: Istanbul's Top 5 Kebab Restaurants

If there are an estimated 17 million souls in Istanbul, then there are at least that many opinions on the best kebab house in town. There are stodgy oak-paneled rooms with country-club appeal, where well-dressed businessmen marvel at heaping plates of delicious grilled meat. And there are 24/7 hole-in-the-walls, where lines form out the door for kebab that is just as tasty and expertly cooked.

Barcelona

Bar del Pla: Off the Charts

Making tapas is like playing the guitar. It's easy to sound pretty good if you strum away on three basic chords, but significantly harder once you start delving into the infinite possibilities of the instrument to get your own style. At Bar del Pla, the tune is a traditional Catalan and Spanish one, but imaginative flourishes, international influences and wonderful ingredients breathe new life into the same old, often-hummed songs. (Yes, we’re still talking about tapas.)

Athens

Vyrinis: Homeward Bound

Behind 2,340-year-old Kallimarmaro Stadium, located in the picturesque area of Athens between Mets and Pagrati, lies a scene that would not be out of place in a provincial city: small neighborhoods, old houses, hilly roads, stray cats, a couple of abandoned houses and old taverns. Among the last, we love Vyrinis, which is especially old and now in the hands of the third generation of the same family. The restaurant has been renovated and updated but still retains some elements of the old tavern, such as the huge wine casks that serve as decoration and the small backyard. Here, young and old contentedly intermingle, and the friendly, always smiling waiters add to the cozy, welcoming atmosphere.

Shanghai

Elixir Health Pot: Hot Tonic

Healthy hotpot sounds like a contradiction in terms, which is probably why Elixir doesn’t even use “hotpot” in its name. Instead it labels itself “health pot” in English, or无老锅 (wúlǎoguō － “No Aging Pot”) in Chinese. Its fountain-of-youth claims are touted by celebrities across Asia, from Mando-Pop’s reigning dancing queen Jolin Tsai to K-Pop crossover star Choi Siwon. Originally from Taiwan, an island that has been ruled by both the Chinese and Japanese in the past century, the restaurant pulls from both Asian countries’ delicious hotpot cultures and holistic medicine traditions to create its menu.

Istanbul

Çiya Sofrası: Istanbul’s Culinary Shrine

For us, one of the highlights of spring in Istanbul is a visit to Çiya Sofrası, the Asian-side eatery that is very likely the best restaurant in Istanbul. It’s certainly not the fanciest or most cutting-edge place in town, but we rarely leave Çiya without having a profoundly new and memorable taste experience. Thanks to glowing write-ups in numerous other places, Çiya – along with a sister restaurant across the street serving excellent kebabs – is no longer the off-the-beaten-path secret it once was. But the restaurant – located on a quiet, pedestrian-only street in the Kadıköy neighborhood’s bazaar – has remained true to what has made it successful in the first place.

Barcelona

Everyday is Fry-Day: Where We Go For the Best Churros in Barcelona

Churros, the long, skinny, crenellated, sweet fried crullers made from just flour, water and salt, have been enjoyed for centuries in Spain, with hot chocolate and without. However, in Barcelona, xurros, as they are called in Catalan, are becoming an endangered species. In recent years, more than half of the xurrerias in the city have disappeared. Many of the old-timer xurreros who still survive have the odds stacked against them: permit renewal for a street stall is near impossible; rent has become prohibitively expensive and continues to increase; or required updates to old infrastructure might prove extremely costly. However, we know of one young newcomer who has emerged with fresh energy and inspiration, incorporating lessons from the masters in his creative take on xurros. The best way to save this endangered species is to eat it, so here are our five favorite xurrerias, which make these star-shaped doughnuts with great care – and with delicious results that are worth seeking out.