Zé Paulo Rocha was born in September, 22 years ago. By December of that year, he was already sleeping on top of a chest freezer in his parents’ tasca, right behind Rossio, one of Lisbon’s main squares. Like so many tasca owners in the Portuguese capital, they had come to Lisbon from northern Portugal’s Minho region years before. As a young teenager, Zé Paulo used to help with the service while his mother cooked and his father ran the business behind the counter, the traditional family tasca format. His professional fate was sealed from the beginning.

Follow a narrow alley radiating off the newly renovated Lado Gudiashvili square whose surrounding rebuilt period houses now exudes the tourist-attracting pastiche pleasantness of reconstructed historic centers, and you’ll stumble upon Uzu House, the sole standing habited ruin left on Saiatnova street. Uzu means “vortex” in Japanese, explains Yamato Kuwahara, the reticent founder of the space, which is registered as a non-profit and functions like an informal art residence – “This space is a vortex that brings different people together…it's a space for everyone, no concept or philosophy attached, ” he adds.

Strolling down the streets of El Clot, you’ll encounter all the usual suspects of a typical residential Barcelona neighborhood: a small butcher, a multigenerational deli, a hole-in-the-wall bar and, of course, a couple of bodegas. Bodegas are the social and culinary epicenters of Barcelona – this is especially true for more residential, working-class neighborhoods like Clot, where eating out at a proper restaurant is a rare event kept for special occasions like birthdays or anniversaries. So for a casual mid-week get together, locals go to their neighborhood bodega for a small copa of nondescript red or white wine and a tapa of boquerones or some simple cold cuts.

In the former Soviet Central Asian republics, the boilerplate restaurant menu consists of plov, lagman, shashlik and samsa. Tired-looking Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Tajik establishments all serve up the same limp noodles and oily rice with a shrug – it’s their job. In the markets of Samarkand, Osh and Almaty, we found some exciting exceptions to this rule but, generally, restaurants in the region tend to successfully obscure the fact that Central Asian food, when cooked with passion, can be a riot of the senses. In Central Asia, according to regional specialist Sean Roberts, culinary traditions have customarily been preserved by a master/apprentice system that mainly existed outside restaurants. Monumental occasions like weddings and funerals in Uzbekistan often involve several hundred guests eating multiple meals. For this, an usta is called in from his day job, like Clark Kent from the newsroom.

Snail khinkali? It might sound, at first, like an odd combination. On closer consideration of Georgian cuisine and history, however, it makes good sense. For one thing – perhaps the most important – they’re tasty, and we have yet to hear anyone who’s tried them disagree. The signature dish at Metis restaurant, which is – for now at least –the only place in Tbilisi one can have them, they remind us more of mushroom than of meat khinkali: savory, smooth, a little buttery, with some brightness from parsley and a hint of pastis. Metis’ logo, a snail with a khinkali for a shell, expresses the playful blend of French and Georgian cuisines that owner Thibault Flament is pursuing in close collaboration with his chef, Goarik Padaryan.

The road from Nepal to Portugal might be a long one, but in recent years it has become surprisingly well trafficked. Since 2006, the Nepalese presence in Portugal has grown by approximately 400%, concentrated in particular in the metropolitan area of Lisbon, part of an Asian community that in relative terms is the fastest growing in the city. A tight-knit community, the Nepali immigrants often find work through compatriot networks, providing each other with mutual support as they settle into life in Portugal. The food industry in particular is an important gateway into local economic life, with Nepalese-run restaurants, groceries and mini-markets now dotting the Portuguese capital.

Lisbon’s communities from Portugal’s former colonies provide the strongest link to the country’s past, when it was the hub of a trading empire that connected Macau in the east to Rio de Janeiro in the west. Though integral elements of Lisbon life, these communities can sometimes be an invisible presence in their adopted land, pushed out to the periphery of the city. With our “Postcolonial Lisbon” series, CB hopes to bring these communities back into the center, looking at their cuisine, history and cultural life. In our five-installment  series, we look at Lisbon’s Mozambican, Goan, Brazilian, Angolan and Cape Verdean communities. Click below to read more.

On a narrow and, until recently, slightly forgotten street in Lisbon’s city center, a simple Cape Verdean eatery is holding its own. As one of the few tascas serving up African dishes in this part of town, Tambarina, with its dozen tables and keyboard and mics set up in the corner, bears testimony to this urban quarter’s historical connections to the people of Africa’s northwestern archipelago. Rua Poço dos Negros – a street whose name (poço means “pit” in Portuguese) reveals a disturbing history as a mass grave site for the bodies of enslaved people – is on the border of what until two decades ago was known as “the triangle.” This is an area extending to São Bento and which in the 1970s became home to a new group of migrant Cape Verdeans.

Those normally finding themselves craving Angolan flavors in central Lisbon head straight to Mouraria, the medieval downtown neighborhood that has experienced a conceptual conversion of its peripheral status into a landmark of cultural and culinary diversity. Despite it being the area with the highest density of Angolans in Lisbon’s city center, Angolan restaurants open and close at a rapid rate, with now-shuttered CB favorites Palanca Gigante and Shilabo’s falling prey to this trend. In the beginning, these restaurants were only popular among the Angolan community, but nowadays, due to the rehabilitation of the neighborhood, a new clientele is discovering them. Now that we can’t get the country’s iconic national dish, muamba, at Shilabo’s or Palanca Gigante, we head to Rato instead for a taste of Angola.

Bhanchha Ghar (Bahn-sah Gar) is the only four-time winner of New York City’s annual Momo Crawl. Early one afternoon, more than a thousand event goers fanned out from the block-long, pedestrian-only Diversity Plaza, at the western edge of Jackson Heights, and called on dozens of nearby restaurants, cafés, trucks and carts. Each dished out at least one style of momo, a filled dumpling best-known from Tibet and Nepal. Several hours later, after momo-crawlers had returned to the plaza and the popular vote had been tallied, Yamuna Shrestha, the owner of Bhanchha Ghar, once again proudly raised the Momo Belt high. The decorated yak-hide belt returned to its glass case, mounted on the back wall of the upstairs dining area, where it overlooks an open kitchen and a handful of tables.

On this full-day tour of central Lisbon, we’ll study the cuisines, history and diversity of Portugal’s former colonies. Get a taste of Cape Verdean cachupa, Brazilian pastries, Goan samosa and and layered convent cake bedecked with spices, Angolan piripiri sauce and meet the people in the kitchen keeping the traditions of these communities alive.

Despite Brazil being the largest of Portugal’s former colonies, the presence of its people in Lisbon has only been felt recently. During the 1950s and 60s, Brazilians in Portugal were limited to small groups of students, a few migrant adventurers and those Portuguese descendants born in Brazil who decided to return to the motherland. However, since the 90s, a more regular coming-and-going has been taking place between Brazil and Portugal. This pendulum-like swing of migration is a consequence of their respective political and economic crises and moments of growth. At the beginning of that decade, many Brazilians moved to Lisbon in the wake of the difficult inflationary crisis that was affecting South America’s biggest nation. By 2005, they formed the largest foreign community settled in the Portuguese capital, with more than 30,000 residents.

Vasco de Gama’s voyage to India in the late 15th century laid the groundwork for the Portuguese empire, in which Goa, a small region on the southwestern coast of the Indian subcontinent with ample natural harbors and wide rivers, would come to play an important role. In the early 16th century, Goa was made the capital of the Portuguese State of India and remained as such until 1961, when the Indian army captured it. Over four centuries of colonial rule, Goan intellectuals most often migrated to Portugal in search of education, especially in the 20th century. Yet following the annexation of Goa by India, many Goans, particularly those working in government and the military, accepted the state’s offer of Portuguese citizenship and made their way to Europe. Others migrated to Mozambique, another Portuguese colony that at the time had not yet gained independence.

Lisbon’s communities from Portugal’s former colonies provide the strongest link to the country’s past, when it was the hub of a trading empire that connected Macau in the east to Rio de Janeiro in the west. Though integral elements of Lisbon life, these communities can sometimes be an invisible presence in their adopted land, pushed out to the periphery of the city. With our “Postcolonial Lisbon” series, CB hopes to bring these communities back into the center, looking at their cuisine, history and cultural life. In this third installment of the series, we dive into Lisbon’s Mozambican community. 

Xiaolongbao first appeared around 1875, during the Ming Dynasty, in Nanxiang, a village on the northwestern outskirts of Shanghai. As the story goes, a vendor selling dry steamed buns decided to innovate due to stiff competition. Legend also suggests, however, that he copied the giant soupier dumplings from Nanjing. Whatever the case, there are several regional varieties of soup dumplings today, including Nanjing-style, which are actually called tāngbāo (汤包), literally meaning “soup bun,” and traditional Shanghainese xiǎolóngbāo, which have heartier wrappers that contain a larger pork meatball in a sweeter pork soup. Here are five of our favorite spots in Shanghai for soup dumplings of all strips.