Visitors to Istanbul's iconic Spice Bazaar encounter a place packed wall-to-wall with overzealous shopkeepers selling everything from saffron to sumac assembled in rows of majestic pyramids at slightly inflated prices. But for our money, the only spices worth a damn are found just outside in a humbler setting. Crammed behind a tiny kiosk perched in front of a fast-food restaurant that flanks one of the bazaar's entrances is the endearing Orhan usta. The loveable 65-year-old is a veritable master of çig köfte and a connoisseur of the spicy red pepper flakes cultivated in his hometown of Gaziantep, the southeastern city considered by many to be Turkey's culinary capital.

Galician restaurants have had a strong presence in Madrid since the 1950s, when the northwestern region’s economic crisis triggered a solid exodus of people towards industrial Spanish cities. This migratory wave, alongside the fact that Galician gastronomy was (and still is) considered one of the best in the country, meant a boom of new restaurants in the capital. It was in the 1970s when brothers Francisco and Marcial Javier moved to Madrid from Lugo, an interior city of Galicia known for its Roman walls, rainy weather and rich food.

Sake is a very deeply ingrained part of Japanese culture and its function is everything from ceremonial to social. It might be surprising then to know that there are remarkably few establishments in Tokyo dedicated to simple sake tasting. This is perhaps because the roots of public sake drinking stretch back to the 1800s, when sake was bought directly from a seller and often consumed on the premises with bits of food. Back then, people stood next to sake kegs and enjoyed the brew, eventually turning crates and barrels on their sides and sitting to enjoy their drinks. Food was soon added and the izakaya was born (a sakaya is a place to purchase sake, and the “i-“ prefix means “to stay.”).

These beautiful giant cabbages were captured at Lisbon's Mercado da Ribeira, an essential stop on our Lisbon Eats: The Culinary Backstreets Essentials walk.

We usually steer clear of the touristy Old City district of Kumkapı, where you are more likely to be accosted by an aggressive maitre d’ trying to corral you into his overpriced fish restaurant than to find something simple, tasty and reasonably priced to eat. Sadly, in order to beat the competition next door, most of Kumkapı’s famed fish restaurants seem to have invested more in aggressive customer corralling tactics than in kitchen talent. However, tucked into the neighborhood’s backstreets, we’ve found a few hidden dining gems that locals in the know frequent. When in the area, we skip Kumkapı’s fish restaurant strip and make a beeline for Doyuran Lokantası, a serious little eating sanctuary on a nearby side street.

Julian Ramirez started out at the age of 14 as a shop boy at a busy bakery in Colonia Guerrero in 1959, then a bustling blue-collar neighborhood, easily connected to downtown by streetcar. Back then, at La Antigua del Guerrero, he learned the business: wiping windows, sweeping up and eventually making deliveries on his bike. One nibble at a time, he picked up the art of cake- and bread-making from the shop’s master bakers. Those trade secrets would serve him over the next 63 years and beyond as they pass on to his kids and theirs. Many of Mexico’s classic bakeries like the Guerrero operation fell one by one with the introduction of mass-produced bread, tearing at a staple of communities across the capital.

What's better than a day at the beach? How about a day at the beach followed by fresh seafood and a cold beer in a vibrant neighborhood with views to boot? Bar do David sits on a busy corner in Rio's Chapéu Mangueira, a favela that overlooks the beaches of Leme and Copacabana. On a recent Sunday afternoon, the bar's two floors and outdoor area were packed with locals and tourists noshing on plates ranging from feijoada de mariscos, a white-bean and seafood take on the classic Brazilian bean stew, to the Estrela do David (Star of David), pineapple-mint pork rib tacos.

A heavy snowstorm left a thick layer of powder in Istanbul, resulting in cancelled classes for several days, and the arrival of countless snowmen. Snowball fights broke out left and right, neighborhood kids used whatever they could to slide down icy hills. Demeanors softened, moods improved. After a tragic beginning in 2017, the city received a much-needed blessing from the sky.

The neighborhood of Metaxourgio in central Athens gets its name from the historic Athanasios Douroutis silk factory (metaxi means “silk”), which closed down in 1875. The former factory, which now houses the Municipal Art Gallery, was designed in 1833 by the Danish architect Hans Christian Hansen and is among the city's most important surviving neoclassical structures. The building was originally intended to be a shopping center, but because the area became an industrial zone, it inevitably attracted mostly working-class residents who were employed in the nearby factories, smaller industries or workshops.

We spent our first few years in Georgia in a whirlwind of overindulgence, hostages to the unforgiving hospitality of friends and acquaintances. Try as they might to convince us that their wine and chacha were so “clean” we would not get hangovers, there were plenty of mornings when the insides of our skulls felt like 60-grain sandpaper and our tongues like welcome mats for packs of wet street mongrels. We would hobble out of bed and stumble to the fridge and, if lucky, find two of Georgia’s most recognized hangover remedies: Borjomi mineral water and matzoni, Georgian yogurt.

Varinas may no longer be prowling the streets of Lisbon, yet they remain iconic characters of the city. Until the 1980s, one would regularly hear these women loudly advertising the fresh fish they sold out of baskets they carried on their heads as they walked the hilly streets around the Lisbon. “In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was what we call the ‘aveirense invasion.’ They were coming mostly from the Aveiro region in northern Portugal, particularly from Ovar,” explains Appio Sottomayor, a journalist, author and a renowned expert in Lisbon history. (This is why they were known as ovarinas and eventually, once the “o” was dropped, varinas.) 

Fresh fish awaiting to be grilled is among the numerous encounters one has on our Two Markets, Two Continents walk, which explores vibrant market areas of the European and Asian sides of Istanbul.

When a menu is written only in Chinese characters, it presents a language barrier for foreigners. When a restaurant offers a Mandarin-only menu and requires diners to handwrite their order in characters, that molehill becomes an actual mountain. But Zhang Mama doesn’t care – diners have been queuing up for upwards of an hour outside the dingy hutong restaurant for a bite of its Sichuan cuisine since it opened in 2009. Why? It’s equal parts delicious and cheap. Demand got so high for this hole-in-the-wall shop that they opened two more shops, one just down the street from the Dongcheng district original and another in Chaoyang district. But it’s still not easy to get a seat during peak mealtimes.

Tacos Beto is not a pretty place. Stacks of soda bottles, enough for weeks to come, serve as a wall that shields customers from the wind blowing down Avenida Dr. José María Vertiz. The plastic tables and plastic stools that surround the bottles seem older than the invention of plastic. A long, dusty awning hanging above the sidewalk seating advertises a brand of soda that Tacos Beto no longer carries, maybe never carried. The only visible beauty encountered at the restaurant sits on the arched wall above the steel fryer, or comal bola – orange and blue paint spell out the words “Tacos Beto – los de cochinada” (“Tacos Beto – the garbage ones”).

On our way to dinner one Friday evening, we hopped in a cab headed for Tarlabaşı, a rather infamous neighborhood in the dead center of Istanbul in which many people still refuse to set foot. The area was a longtime hotbed of Greek and Armenian artisans and tradesmen, once the backbone of Ottoman-era Istanbul’s commercial life, who erected rows of gorgeous European-style apartment buildings beginning in the 19th century. Many stand proudly today, while dozens of others are fenced off and awaiting renovation as part of an invasive gentrification project that seeks to remodel the now decrepit, impoverished Tarlabaşı. By the end of 1970s, Tarlabaşı's Greeks and Armenians had packed up and left the neighborhood and the country, following difficult decades of anti-minority policies and attacks. In their place came a motley crew of other disenfranchised people: Kurds fleeing conflict in the southeast of the country, Roma living on the fringes of society, transgender sex workers, economic migrants and political refugees.