Grain de Sable is tucked into Rue de Baignoir, which runs under the skybridge of Marseille’s Alcazar public library, near the Vieux Port. The clientele for this excellent lunch spot is as local as it gets, and comes mainly from the library itself, particularly its 400-staff-member media center. Customers who come to Grain de Sable from farther afield hear about it de bouche à oreille (by word of mouth) and find a way to dart across the city from work to enjoy an organic midday meal. For visitors, this restaurant offers a simple, healthful, and inventive meal as a welcome pause from rich food offered in many Marseille eateries. ,

At the bottom of a quiet street in Colonia Reforma, a neighborhood located in the northern-central area of Oaxaca City which hides many of the city’s best-kept food secrets, we find Garnachas La Güera. While the area is characterized by its quiet, residential streets, this restaurant is a small paradise where joy, music and good food transport you to the tropics. Garnachas La Güera specializes in food from Juchitán, a village in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, close to Oaxaca’s southeastern coast and the border with the neighboring state of Chiapas. If Oaxaca is a state, Juchitán is like its own country within it.

In Italy, “we would call this a bar,” Caterina Pepe tells us. We're chatting inside Cerasella (pronounced “Chair-ah-Sell-ah”), the small pasticceria e caffetteria she owns with her husband, Luca Schiano, not far from their home in Long Island City. In New York, of course, a bar is typically adults-only, and rarely known for its food. Using that name for Cerasella, Caterina adds, would lead New Yorkers astray – but happily so, once they found themselves in front of the pastry case. Caterina and Luca have adopted the term caffeteria instead, to perfectly describe Cerasella: a meeting place for friends and family, suitable for all ages, that serves coffee, breakfast, snacks and sandwiches. Luca, 35, and Caterina, 28, were both born near the Amalfi Coast, in Naples and Montecorvino Rovella, respectively. In Italy, however, their paths never crossed.

Pastel de tres leches is beloved throughout much of Latin America, and yet its origins remain a mystery. Some people claim that it was first baked in Nicaragua, others that the recipe was first printed on the label of a well-known brand of canned condensed milk in Mexico. Tres leches is usually a sponge cake soaked – as you might have guessed from the name – in a mixture of condensed, evaporated and regular milk, which might be flavored with vanilla, rum and cinnamon. The cake is baked and soaked in the milk mixture while it’s still warm and in the pan. It sits overnight so that the milk and flavorings thoroughly saturate every bite.

On this seven-day culinary experience, we’ll be studying the city of Istanbul through its kitchens.

Piraeus – located about 10 kilometers south of downtown Athens – is not just the largest port of Greece, but it is also among the top five most important ports in Europe. Aside from the port, Piraeus covers a large area, some of which is residential and other parts which are more industrial. Though it may seem chaotic at first glance – especially for the many visitors who arrive at the port by ferry from a lovely little island and are shocked to suddenly find themselves in a grey city – the truth is that Piraeus hides a nostalgic flair and charm that is rare to come across in cities these days.

It might easily be mistaken for a hipster café. From the street in buzzing Shinjuku City ward, a large window illuminates an open kitchen where Yuichi Itoi, sporting a baseball cap, white T-shirt and piercings, is prepping ingredients. As we step inside, we’re greeted by the sound of low-key hip-hop and the chatter of two young couples sat at the counter, sipping drinks. Two men are at a table butted up against a bare brick wall, an open laptop amidst their plates. But this is no café. Tempura Dining Itoi is a restaurant born from chef-owner Itoi’s devotion to washoku – traditional Japanese cuisine. Except here, he’s doing things his way. 

When The Joint first opened on Ventura Boulevard in the summer of 2018, the concept of dry-aged fish was still very much unknown in Los Angeles, even though master sushi chefs typically age their tuna for a few days and have been doing so for some 400 years. At The Joint, though, owner and fishmonger Liwei Liao takes this a few steps further by dry-aging different types of fish and sometimes aging certain fish for up to three months. From salmon to mackerel to branzino, Liao has perfected the art of dry-aging fish over the years, and now he’s spreading the word.

The seaside district of Chiaia, perhaps best known for Via Caracciolo, a boulevard with sweeping views of the Bay of Naples, is the most elegant neighborhood in Naples. Long the seat of the Neapolitan aristocracy, the area is studded with Art Nouveau palaces, elegant boutiques, and Villa Pignatelli, a house museum with an impressive art collection. But our favorite corner of the neighborhood is Piazzetta Ascensione, a quiet little square at the top of Via Ascensione (the Latin phrase nomen omen, “the name [is] a sign,” applies here, so be ready for a climb). It’s so dear to us in part because there’s a small, charming restaurant just off the square, one with a very distinctive name: Cap’alice.

Horta, which means “vegetable garden,” is an old neighborhood in the hills of Barcelona. When it was still a vilage, it was known for its many water streams and resulting farms and vegetables. It is very close to Collserola Natural Park, a large green space in the northern part of the city. From the top of this park, you can enjoy incredible views of the city, and behind its skyline, the sea, far in the distance. But you don’t have to go far for great fish and seafood dishes. Horta’s authentic fish corner, El Racó del Peix, is the neighborhood go-to for amazing dishes direct from the market. Arturo Garzón and María José Millán are partners in both life and business, each with a long history in the market of Montserrat in the Nou Barris neighborhood. There, Arturo’s family has owned a fruit and vegetable stall for three generations.

Les Akolytes has the best damn seat in the house of Marseille. Akolytes’ long shaded tables, which seat over thirty people family style, is found directly across from the entry to Plage de Catalan – the first urban beach encountered when walking up from the Vieux Port. Marseille has quite a number of sea-view restaurants, but none compare to this location’s proximity to the sea and its heady brine and breeze and to its front row seats to Marseille’s beach pageant just across the street. Particularly at Catalan, every kind of human being, every look, color, origin, and age, makes their way by velo, scooter, laughing, walking, talking, crossing over, to wade into the waters glimmering before those sitting at Akolytes’ tables.

“For me, it’s a grandma’s dish,” says Miguel Peres, without hesitation, when asked about his relationship with pastéis de massa tenra, a Lisbon specialty of deep-fried, palm-sized pastries filled with meat. “She would make a lot of them and freeze them, so we would always have them around. When there was a birthday or party, we would pull them out and fry them. We would take them to the beach in boxes. As kids, we would eat them with carrot rice and salad, using the pastries to scoop the rice.” Miguel is the chef-owner of Pigmeu, a pork-focused, head-to-tail restaurant in Lisbon, where pastéis de massa tenra can be found on the menu. He’s made some subtle updates to his grandma’s recipe, but the fundamentals remain intact: a thin, golden, pockmarked, crumbly pastry concealing a fine, tender, salty, savory pork filling.

Any journey on the Shinkansen – Japan’s bullet train – is the perfect opportunity to enjoy an ekiben, the iconic bento filled with an assortment of delicacies tucked into a container and eaten in bite-size pieces. The term comes from the Japanese words for train (eki) combined with ben for bento (or “lunchbox”). These little jewel boxes are sold at concessions in train stations across the country and occasionally via pushcarts on trains. Different regions of Japan offer up varieties of local ingredients or specialties, making the ekiben a cornucopia of Japanese cuisine. Before airplanes became inexpensive and frequent in Japan, rail travel was the only mass transportation for long distances.

It took four years and four months, but Mercado do Bolhão, Porto’s central market and historic icon, finally came back to life in September. The first to arrive at the reopening was Nossa Senhora da Conceição, the market’s patron saint, whose image was installed in front of the new structures that are now part of the centenarian building. Located at the entrance to the grand market, which measures more than five thousand square meters, the saint's image welcomes the visitors who have filled the new space every day since the doors finally opened.

Casa da Índia is not, despite the name, an Indian restaurant. The menu boasts a pretty standard repertoire of the type of hearty, meat-and-potatoes dishes one would associate with Portugal: grilled sardines, salt cod baked with cream, stewed fava beans. “This space used to be a warehouse for spices,” says Paulo Campos, Casa da Índia’s manager, when asked about the restaurant’s rather misleading name. “We’re close to the river, so this is where spices, coffee, tea and other things from India were stored. The owners wanted to retain this legacy, so they gave it this name.”