The historic Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles looks very different today than it used to. Opened in 1917, Grand Central Market began as a public market with a variety of vegetable stands and meat and poultry shops, a place for people to get their daily groceries. Over a hundred years later, the market still stands, but a big revitalization project that started around 2013 has transformed this local landmark. While the architecture and interior of the market remains mostly the same, the project has drawn new, hip food vendors to the historic space, now lit with vibrant neon signs. On weekends, long lines form around popular stalls like Eggslut and Broad Street Oyster Co. Among the new vendors, legacy businesses are still holding on, serving both longtime and new customers.

“Our collard greens are from scratch and are delicious. Our red beans are really good. Our gumbo is great. The fried chicken is a standout. And our catfish – you can get it fried, grilled, or blackened – it’s so good, we could basically just be a catfish place and satisfy a lot of our regulars.” That’s Martha Wiggins, two-time James Beard Foundation Award semifinalist and Executive Chef at Cafe Reconcile, when asked to describe what her loyal following of regulars most frequently order at her lunchtime-only restaurant.

The main street that flanks the Gayrettepe metro station in central Istanbul is lined with a number of imposing skyscrapers that increase in frequency as the avenue progresses towards the frenetic Mecidiyeköy district, a stretch of urban chaos that has a Gotham City vibe, particularly when it’s rainy, cold and dark outside. But heading into the backstreets of Gayrettepe reveals a calm, classic Istanbul neighborhood with a number of hidden gems. Among these is Oklava, a four-table pasta restaurant located inside an aging building complex. The menu changes daily and there are about half a dozen items on it, featuring fresh, handmade pasta prepared with high-quality hand-picked ingredients. Before discovering the restaurant, Gayrettepe was synonymous with the Department of Immigration and the local tax office where we paid our residence permit fees, but now we have a less stressful reason to visit the area.

Woodside recently came to mind when we spoke with Franco Raicovich, the chef and a co-owner of Fuzi Pasta, a restaurant in Fresh Meadows. Franco grew up in Woodside, and on Sundays he would visit his father’s parents, Nonno Bepe and Nonna Angela, and help to fold the fuzi, an Istrian pasta that's now the namesake of his restaurant. Those childhood Sundays were a half-century ago. Today, the elevated 7 train that takes us eastward from Manhattan to Jackson Heights, Corona and Flushing passes over a very different Woodside, and yet more than ever, it's a neighborhood that shouldn't be overlooked. True, Woodside is crisscrossed by Queens Boulevard and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE), which corral many lanes of auto traffic at all hours, as well as the LIRR commuter rail.

From the point in 2002 when multibillionaire Carlos Slim inked a deal with Mexico City to revitalize its historic center until now, there have been layers of change. Streets were made pedestrian-only after months of work by bulldozers and jackhammers. Broken windows and abandoned buildings have been replaced with countless new shop fronts offering shiny opportunities. Despite the strictures of tough legal bulwarks against eviction, a Giuliani-esque wave of economic empowerment has swept the city’s center, spray-brushing away signs of endemic poverty in ironic lockstep with scheduled protests by social-justice movements ranked by those who casually grab a bite after the march. Crowds are swelling along the planned corridors.

Behind Istanbul's hulking Çağlayan courthouse in the center of town near the main highway, there is a series of mixed industrial-residential neighborhoods with a handful of restaurants, none of which are particularly noteworthy. That was until Kaburgacı Koray recently opened up shop on the corner of a backstreet in the area, quickly winning over not just the lawyers and other courthouse employees who now have a lunch spot to die for, but also people from all over town, who, like us, quickly realized that Kaburgacı Koray is perhaps the best kebapçı in Istanbul.

Walk into most any izakaya in Tokyo and you’ll find folks gathered around tables overloaded with an assortment of sashimi, yakitori, edamame, cups of sake and bottles of Asahi. Here is Japan’s answer to the tapas bar, outshining most any after-work happy hour. The charm of izakaya dining lies in the variety: From crispy tempura to savory miso cod, each dish demands sharing and, sometimes, a little exploration. Once the exclusive stomping grounds for sarariman (salarymen) to unwind their ties and ambitions, izakayas can sometimes be the domain of tobacco-puffing old men. But times are changing, with spots like Shake Kojima serving mostly female clientele. The izakaya was featured in a popular manga adaptation, in which a young woman ditches her co-workers to eat and drink her way through Tokyo.

As he drove us to Tlacolula, some 19 miles east of Oaxaca City, in his burgundy-and-white taxi, salsa music in the background and a tiny bronze cross hanging from his rearview mirror, our driver Félix was philosophizing about migration. Like many other Oaxacan men, he had, at one point, crossed the border from Mexico to California in search of a better life. And like many fellow countrymen, he had come back home because he refused to live a life of persecution and uncertainty due to his legal status as an undocumented immigrant. His life back in Mexico was good; hard, yes, but joyful. “I can eat fresh fruits, dance with my kids, watch them grow. If this is not quality of life, I don’t know what it is,” he reflects. The music stops and so does Félix’s taxi. In the middle of the Tlacolula highway we’ve arrived at one of the area’s largest gas stations, and our destination.

In Georgia, there are certain dishes that everyone associates with Orthodox Easter: paska, a sweet panettone-like bread and chakapuli, a lamb stew. However, there is another Georgian Easter tradition, one often overlooked: nazuki. Beautifully glazed and filled with raisins and spices, in recent years these fluffy sweet breads have become associated almost exclusively with the village of Surami in the Kartli region. In this small settlement between Tbilisi and Kutaisi in the West, huts line the side of the highway, each with a tone (a cylindrical traditional oven), a baker and a family nazuki recipe.

We were somewhat intimidated by doing a profile of Nova Pombalina, a snack bar in Lisbon’s Baixa neighborhood. When we stopped by to arrange an interview and shoot, the staff – when they finally had a spare second to chat – seemed slightly suspicious and generally disinterested. And our first attempt at a shoot and interview was postponed for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to us. It isn’t much different when we ultimately arrive. It’s 11 a.m. on a Saturday, but the place is already buzzing with customers – a slightly rowdy group of Irish bros, a local who had stopped in for breakfast, a couple Spanish families. Eventually, when things slow down, we sit down at a table with co-owner, Manuel Maurício. He tells us that in 1980, he and his brother, Virgílio, took over the space, which had been in operation since 1938.

When the neighborhood institution Öz Konak Lokantası closed back in December 2022, it left a hole in the bustling, bohemian-turned-touristy Cihangir neighborhood for reliable, homestyle lunch and dinner food. And not just food, but a feeling of community and home that the restaurant had offered its former customers. Dilara Eren, a chef and recipe developer, was, at that moment, finishing up a job as the Turkey community manager for a food recipe app and figuring out what was next in her career. She’d managed a big restaurant in the past and had been catering on the side, building a local following for her creative, delicious dishes. Neighborhood friends kept saying, “We need a new lunch place to replace Oz.” With that in mind she opened Zerze, an inviting, new-generation lokanta on the busy main street that runs through the neighborhood.

Our most immediate question about a spring day in Queens is often answered when we wake up, just by looking out the window: How's the weather? Springtime in Queens can be overcast or sunny, drizzly or dry, blustery or breezy, chilly or temperate, often cycling between pleasant and inclement every two or three days. When we identify a day that's too good to waste indoors, it's time to take full advantage.

At the end of a long wooden table, a foursome passes colorful plates of food: mouthwatering meat dumplings in tomato sauce, sauteed zucchini topped with minty yogurt, and rice flecked with cumin. Sitting across from a refrigerator, below a row of fake potted plants, and beside shelves stacked with mismatched plates, they could be dining at someone’s house. Which is, in fact, Chez Romain et Marion’s raison d’être. “We want people to feel honored that they’re dining at an Afghan family’s home,” shares Romain. His mother, Myriam Rahman Ebadi, simmers homey dishes like dâl, turmeric red lentils, and achak, leek ravioli, in the restaurant’s tiny kitchen.

On a weeknight near the tail end of March, Istanbul found some clear skies after an annoyingly wet winter. The sky was navy blue, verging on purple, and it was jean-jacket weather, the best kind. Just shy of 10 p.m., we ambled through our most-frequented corner of the Beyoğlu district, the area where Mis, Kurabiye and Süslü Saksı Streets converge. This triangle is home to some of our favorites: Köfteci Hüseyin fires up some of the tastiest grilled meatballs in Istanbul, Zübeyir Ocakbaşı grills skewers of the best lamb money can buy, Müşterek and Meclis offer excellent meze in a warm setting, while Marlen is our favorite place to drown in pints of Tuborg beer or sip reasonably-priced cocktails. That early-spring night, the outdoor tables were mostly full, and would have been jam-packed had it been a weekend.

I moved to London in 2013 after living in Athens for five years with my sister. During that time, the first time we really lived on our own as adults, we developed a few routines and obsessions around food that we still follow to this day. They mostly revolved around our then-neighborhood, Mavili Square, and the center of Athens. In the years that followed, any plans to visit home started with picking which day we would go and get ourselves some souvlaki from Kostas on Mitropoleos street and peinirli from Peinirli Ionias on Panormou street (yes, both of these would happen on the same day!).