Every fall, traditional Catholic families join together to pray and honor the dead, bringing candles and flowers to cemeteries and sharing meals at home. For many, Mexico’s colorful Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations come to mind. In Spain, this type of holiday takes the form of All Saints’ Day, a Christian appropriation of the Celtic Samhain, the night of the dead. It has also become closely connected with the joyful and ancient pagan celebration of the end of the harvest, marked by the festival called Castanyada (in Catalonia) or Magosto (in other parts of Spain). Throughout Spain and Portugal, people gather to eat roasted castañas (chestnuts) and other seasonal foods, drink the first young wine of the year and enjoy the last warm weather before winter.

“Caliente!” Juan calls out, and we all duck to avoid the steaming hot pan as it floats across the kitchen. He holds one side with a folded up towel, the other with a pair of pliers. Kitchen might be a bit of a misnomer. The small stall sits on the sidewalk, with a temporary tin roof overhead and brand new white tarps tied tightly to the back to protect against Mexico City’s afternoon thunderstorms. Each day for the three weeks leading up to Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead holiday, Tito Garcia, the stand’s owner, and the rest of the crew, will make hundreds of pan de muerto sweet rolls, as part of the Jamaica Market’s holiday romería.

In Oaxaca, a state where gastronomy is almost a religion, there are some extraordinary dishes that are prepared only for special occasions because of the complexity of preparation. Mole chichilo, for example, uses more than 30 ingredients, and its preparation can take up to 3 days. But there are spectacularly tasty (and complex) dishes that can be had anytime. One of these is caldo de piedra (stone soup) from the Tuxtepec region. On our last visit to Oaxaca City, we visited a restaurant a few miles outside of the center whose rendition of this soup blew our minds.

Back in the day, weary travelers in Spain could make a stop at a village fonda, a type of inn or tavern, for a hearty meal and a place to rest their heads. Today, in Latin America, fonda has a more contemporary meaning, including popular restaurants and cantinas serving food and drinks. Both rely on down-home, no-frills fare. But at Fonda Pepa in Barcelona, chefs Pedro Baño and Paco Benítez have taken this concept to new gastronomic heights. The restaurant has the easygoing vibe of a village canteen, with the flavors of a royal kitchen. It was the Covid-19 pandemic that gave the Catalan Pedro and Mexican Paco the last little push they needed to jump into a new personal adventure.

Walking inside the bright Café (R)égal, the familiar ingredients of a sustainable restaurant can be seen. Here, a chalkboard lists the local farmers from which foodstuffs are sourced. Each table is topped with cloth napkins instead of disposable paper. A poster on the wall shows the happy chickens that benefit from the kitchen’s compost. All these elements minimize Café (R)égal’s impact on the environment. What makes them unique, is how this conscientious café is also making an impact on people’s lives. Café (R)égal is a restaurant d’insertion, meaning it offers work training to people with disabilities. These apprenticeships provide a much-needed springboard into the workforce and something even more essential: a place where folks of all backgrounds are on the same footing.

Back in 1966, when it opened on Avenida da República, one the main roads connecting the new avenues of Lisbon with the city center, Galeto caused quite a commotion. Lisboetas flocked to the huge snack bar, seduced by both the design – it was styled like an American diner – and the menu, which in those days seemed wildly innovative. Locals used to more conservative Portuguese fare were suddenly introduced to club sandwiches, burgers, mixed plates that brought together some wildly disparate elements and even Brazilian feijoada. Eating at the long counters while perched on a comfy seat was quite different from sitting on a stool at an everyday tasca. When combined with the avant-garde décor, swift service, and long hours (it was open late, until 3:30 a.m.), it felt like Lisbon was catching up with the dining habits elsewhere in Europe or the U.S.

Amaghleba Street and its environs stretch like a long arm of the Sololaki neighborhood up into Tbilisi’s hills. The broad main street is lined with 19th-century brick buildings, some of them graced with the magnificent wooden balconies characteristic of Old Tbilisi. At No. 16 sits Terracotta, where a patinaed metal awning hangs over steps heading down into the small, welcoming restaurant and wine bar below. The warm earth tones inside evoke its history as a ceramics studio, and the vases, cups and plates on display are a direct inheritance of Tata Samkharadze, who took over her parents’ art space when they chose to close it in 2018. In its place, she opened a small restaurant a year later with cook Anna Burduli.

Manuel Azevedo and Francisco Moreira, now both in their 70s, have been friends since childhood. Such a close connection has afforded them the trust and togetherness required to run O Buraco, the restaurant in Porto that the duo have presided over like generals for almost 50 years. In fact, it was right after completing his military service that Manuel, a native of Marco de Canaveses, a city within the greater Porto municipality, came to Porto proper in search of work. “I picked up the newspaper, saw the ad, applied and was hired as a waiter,” he tells us. On February 4, 1971, he entered O Buraco (“The Hole” for the first time; he hasn’t left since.

In Naples, the postale (mail ship) arrives from Palermo every morning and leaves in the evening for the return journey across the Tyrrhenian Sea. Forget about the sensational yet tired connection made between the two cities in the popular imagination – that of the Mafia in Palermo and Camorra in Naples. For us, the postale represents a far more interesting link: The “mozzarella and cannoli connection.” On the Naples-Palermo route, dozens of people can be seen transporting plastic containers holding mozzarella from the Campania region into Sicily. On the opposite route, cannoli and Sicilian cassata (cake) boxes abound. This trafficking of edibles reflects a gastronomic relationship that has long existed between the two cities.

Just to the east of Flushing, the home of New York City's largest and fastest-changing Chinatown, is a sprawling neighborhood that boasts many of the city's most interesting Korean restaurants and food shops. We hesitate to call it a Koreatown. Compared with the few dense blocks of Manhattan's Koreatown, this part of Queens has a more open feel, with modest buildings, wider streets and more sunlight. Here, in the late 1700s, the Murray family owned a nursery of more than 100 acres filled with trees and other plants imported from around the world. In the late 1800s, when the nursery gave way to residential development, the burgeoning neighborhood was named for the family: Murray Hill.

We woke one Sunday craving omuraisu, our favorite Japanese comfort food. Omuraisu, sometimes rendered as omurice, is an umami bomb: a soft egg omelet arranged over rice studded with a protein such as chicken or pork and a flourish of ketchup-laced demi-glace sauce over the top. So we headed to Edoya, a yoshoku outpost in central Tokyo that opened over 60 years ago and became popular thanks to a particularly affable chef. Although it means “Western food,” yoshoku is a decidedly Japanese creation, one inspired by a 19th-century notion of pan-European cuisine. Developed with the support of the Meiji Emperor around 1900, this style of cooking places a great emphasis on meats, often paired with rich demi-glace sauces, which many believed would help Japanese people become larger in build.

This may come as a surprise, even to locals, but Barcelona has its own “urban” vineyards and winery. Located inside an old masía (farmhouse) in Collserola Natural Park, a vast greenspace on the edge of Barcelona’s northwestern city limits, the winery – originally a project established by the Barcelona City Council – uses grenache and syrah grapes grown in those vineyards to produce an outstanding full-bodied blend. But more than simply a winery, the project, known as Can Calopa-L’Olivera, is also an effort to provide city dwellers some important lessons about sustainability and the existence of alternative economies. At the same time, it allows agricultural life to make a healing return to the urban sphere, something Barcelona locals started thinking about more seriously during the Covid crisis.

Fall often crashes down like a ton of bricks over Istanbul, but it’s a welcome blow. Crisp evenings replace sticky, humid ones overnight. During the day it’s warm enough to walk around in a T-shirt if it’s sunny, though you may need to have a sweater on hand if the sun dips behind a cloud. It was a late afternoon in early October that cemented our deep love for Istanbul. We boarded a ferry from the Anatolian side before the sun set. It was still warm enough to sit outside without a jacket, and the energy of the changing season, both invigorating and soothing, coursed through the air and then our veins.

A 16th-century tower stands at the southern edge of the Plage des Catalans, the closest beach to Marseille’s city center. The Tour Paul was one of the city’s lazarets, quarantine stations for sick sailors to prevent disease from entering the city. In ruins after centuries of erosion, the Infirmerie Vielle (“Old Infirmary”) is now being rehabilitated thanks to a successful historical preservation campaign. One hundred yards away, a modern infirmary has had a different fate. It’s been transformed into a homey restaurant. At Maison M&R, healing comes in the form of comfort food, homemade pastries, and a familial welcome. The café’s community vibe is fitting for the village-like Catalans quarter.

Historically, Guizhou is one of China’s most overlooked provinces. The landlocked location in central China is sandwiched between the famous spice havens of Sichuan and Chongqing to the north and Hunan to the East, and tucked behind the tourist destination of Yunnan to the west. It has the largest population of people in poverty and lowest income per person in China, and the geography of the province has made it tough to travel around; mountainous roads and lack of infrastructure don’t make for easy tourism. Its biggest claim to fame has been Kweichow Moutai (Wade-Giles Romanization of Guizhou Maotai), the famous state-owned baijiu brand served to Richard Nixon when he met Mao Zedong.