Initially, it was books that led Fernando Rodriguez Delgado to his interest in cacao. Today Rodriguez runs Chocolate Macondo, a café that specializes in ancient preparations of cacao, but prior to that he was a bookseller, fanatical about reading and fascinated by the history of Mexico. The day that he came across the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century manuscript documenting Mesoamerican culture, was an important one: it would eventually spark his countrywide search to discover the traditions of cacao and seek out ingredients, the names of which he only knew in Nahuatl. Rodriguez didn’t speak this native language of Mexico, so trying to work out the recipes for cacao drinks he found in the codex was no easy task.

Google khachapuri and the top images that pop up are that of the classic boat-shaped version, its golden orb of an egg yolk cracked in the center of melty cheese still bubbling fresh out of the oven. This classic recipe from the Black Sea coastal region of Adjara that gives it its name, Adjaruli khachapuri, is undeniably one of the most iconic visual representations of Georgian cuisine. While indeed an undeniably photogenic and enticingly seductive dish, the Adjaruli khachapuri’s domineering image often obscures the fact that there are dozens of different varieties of the khachapuri that exist around the country. Most restaurant menus options are also often reduced to just a handful of varieties, like the imeruli, with a single layer of cheese baked inside, the more opulent megruli, which adds a crust of cheese on top, and the all too ubiquitous Adjaruli.

Few places in New York are home to such a diverse cross section of the Jewish diaspora as Forest Hills, especially the broad stretch of 108th Street tucked behind the imposing apartment blocks that abut Queens Boulevard. If you stand in front of Carmel Grocery, a plain-looking shop at the heart of the modest business district, you’re likely to hear Hebrew, Bukhori, Russian, Georgian and Yiddish along with the thick Queens accents of the neighborhood’s longtime Ashkenazi Americans. And many of the voices you hear are probably on their way into the grocery, lured by the smell of freshly roasted coffee.

Nanohana could almost be mistaken for someone’s house if it weren’t for a small lectern, propping open an enthusiastically-scrawled menu. The restaurant is small and discreet, tucked down a side street, where its sandy-colored walls and wooden door with glass panels blends into a charming old neighborhood in Ueno in the east of Tokyo. We pull open that door to reveal a cosy, retro interior, a few dark wood tables, green lamps on the wall and an S-shaped counter behind which lies the kitchen. Most striking, however, is the paraphernalia from Sado Island – maps, old photos and bottles of sake line the walls. It’s clear we have stumbled into a home-away-from-home, a labor of love created by Nanohama’s owners, couple Tadahiro and Nami Ishizuka.

We are inside the renovated Galleria Principe di Napoli, right between the National Archaeological Museum and the Academy of Fine Arts. Tables line a corner of the gallery’s beautiful interior, and the art-deco ceiling arches above us– to sit at Lazzarelle Bistrot is a real pleasure, for the eyes and the stomach. But this cafe is more than a pretty little gem in the newly renovated galleria. It is a project long in the making for the Lazzarelle cooperative, which has been promoting the social and economic inclusion of women inmates and working to reduce recidivism for about a decade. In Naples, a lazzarella defines herself as a restless, lively girl, while others may use the definition “little rascal."

For a while, French-Georgian fusion restaurant Métis, which opened in 2017, seemed to be the only place in town to get snails, served in their iconic snail khinkali. We took several trips to Akhaltsikhe and other areas of Samtskhe-Javakheti, asking for snails, and were always told the season was wrong or to look somewhere else. Then, in April 2021, Chef Guram Bagdoshvili added his riff on Meskhetian snails to the menu of his Georgian-Asian restaurant Chveni, and, with the recent addition of snail khinkali to their menu as well, today there are at least three snail dishes easily available to the avid Tbilisi gastropod consumer.

In Mesoamerica, beans have been a pillar of culinary traditions – not to mention civilizations – from time immemorial. Pre-Columbian peoples depended on legumes as their primary source of protein, but they were more than mere sustenance. Beans (along with corn) were some of the most important crops for sale at the local markets because they could be used as currency. Their value was based on the physical appearance of the product (color and size). The Aztecs included beans in the list of tributes that their vassal states had to pay. Bernardino de Sahagún, a Spanish friar, documented the use of beans in the Aztec empire, noting that the native people ate tamales mixed with beans. Storing and administering these crops was critical in order to be prepared for times of shortage.

Known in Catalan as mongetes – “little nuns,” as Catalonia’s oldest kind of beans resemble the pale face of a nun in her black habit – or fesols, from the Latin phaseolus, beans are an integral part of the region’s culinary traditions. If Catalan home cooking could be represented by a single dish, it would be butifarra amb mongetes, peppery pork sausage which is either grilled or fried and served with a little mountain of delicious beans: simple, filling and soul-warming. But in Catalonia the number of dishes made with legumes is infinite. In fact, many local restaurants offer a choice of beans or potatoes to go with all manner of seafood or meat preparations, from chicken to pork or veal, or from cod to squid or sardines.

Unlike many other pulses, most bean varieties were not native to the eastern Mediterranean, originating instead in Central and South America. Yet they have adapted well to the climate in Greece (and across the globe) and are now quite popular and an important source of protein here, where they are cooked in a variety of ways. In fact, the bean soup known as fasolada is considered our national dish – it’s humble, affordable and easy-to-cook yet still hearty and delicious. Gigantes (“giants”) are particularly loved in Greece. These large white beans are also known as elephant beans, a nod to their size. Some of the best giant beans in Greece are grown in the country’s northwest, most famously in Prespes and Kastoria, both regions with a PGI (Protected Geographic Indication) for giant beans.

Istanbul’s eaters are spoiled by opportunities to eat great beans – and in the Turkish kitchen that means white beans, in particular, and if you’re lucky, the şeker fasulye type grown in Eastern Turkey’s İspir region. We’ve tried countless subtle variations on roughly the same recipe and, wiping mouth on sleeve after a bowl, declared that we could eat beans every single day of the week. We’ve spent a lot of time comparing almost identical-tasting Black Sea-style beans and hunted down those that are harder to categorize. Taking part in the bean discourse is a great pleasure of ours and we are not alone in doing so. Turkish newspapers regularly run features analyzing the baked bean, featuring inserts ranking the best beans, nationally, by a panel of judges. It’s a gas. In this roundup we’ve compiled our favorite beans in different styles. Though the gold standard achieved by standouts Hüsrev and Fasuli is widely agreed to be the best in show, we’ve included a couple of quirky beaneries in our list of favorites, because, in reality, you can’t eat the same beans every day.

We met Tega at a friend’s dinner table shortly after moving to Tbilisi in 2002. Tall, debonair, with dark puppy eyes and an ever-present Colgate smile, Tega made it a point from that first meeting to take us under his wing and introduce us to the best Tbilisi had to offer. That was how we first ended up at Salobie, near the ancient capital of Mtskheta. “This place is famous for its beans,” he said. “And its name is Beans!” he chortled (lobio means “beans” in Georgian, and salobie is “house of beans”). The restaurant felt like something between a museum and a summer mountain resort. We were in the original dining room, built next to a giant 300-year-old wooden house from Racha.

It’s fairly common for a son to claim his mother’s cooking as the best (especially in Turkey), but how often does he open a restaurant for her? Cihan knew a good thing when he opened Kitelimmi Kitel Burger in the Kıztaşı neighborhood of Fatih. Not only is the food delicious, but his immi (mom) Ümit cooks up fare you can’t get many other places in Istanbul. Ümit hails from the city of Batman, and the menu at Kitelimmi reflects dishes from nearby Siirt. Food from that southeastern region tends to favor meat, chilis, spices and sour flavors – a reflection in part of Arab influence that goes back generations ( a heritage which Ümit’s family also claims). On the menu here is pırtıke, a spinach soup thick with chickpeas and rice in a thick, dark broth tart with nar ekşisi and sumac.

Lately, however, those cravings can be sated closer to home – at Queens Lanka in Jamaica, a specialty grocery that also boasts a small but mighty kitchen and a few seats to accommodate dine-in customers. There’s no room for the weekend buffet that figures prominently in several of Staten Island’s Sri Lankan restaurants, but for curry, kottu roti and banana-leaf-wrapped lamprais, there’s no need to leave the neighborhood. Rasika Wetthasinghe is the chef; Suchira Wijayarathne runs the market. A helper assists with preparation in the kitchen a few days a week, and a number of the kitchen’s bespoke spice blends are prepared elsewhere, but by and large this is a two-man operation.

“Blue Monday,” the tune made famous by New Orleans legend Fats Domino and written by the equally legendary Dave Bartholomew, sums up how most of us feel at the beginning of the week after the giddiness of the weekend has worn off and reality beckons.  “Blue Monday, how I hate Blue Monday,” Domino sings, while the piano trills underneath his rich baritone voice. And who could blame him? Monday is a a day of toil, even in carefree New Orleans, where Monday traditionally meant laundry day. But from this toil, one of our most recognizable and renowned dishes was born: red beans and rice. Every Monday in restaurants and homes throughout the city, the slow-simmered-until-they-fall-apart, creamy beans, loaded with smoked sausage and pickled meat, are served over a bed of fragrant Louisiana long grain rice, often with a piece of fried chicken or a pork chop.

The Catalan ensaïmada is more than just a pastry – the sweet, spiral-shaped bread covered in powdered sugar serves as a direct link to the ancient Sephardic Jewish history of Spain and, more specifically, the Balearic Island of Mallorca (Majorca, in English). Despite the Jewish connection, the name of the pastry actually comes from the Catalan word for lard, saïm, and literally means “mixed with lard.” According to recent research conducted by the Majorcan pastry chef and culinary anthropologist Tomeu Arbona, ensaïmadas are Christianized relatives of an ancient Jewish bread baked on the island, similar to braided challah.