Port wine and Madeira wine are well-known Portuguese fortified varieties, but Moscatel de Setúbal remains a perfect stranger for many visitors. Which is a shame, since this wine – complex and elegant, with a delicate sweetness and rich flavor – is one of Portugal’s great vinous pleasures. In Lisbon and the south bank, it’s common to enjoy a small glass of Moscatel (muscatel) as either an aperitif (chilled) or a digestive. The fertile land of Setúbal, a peninsula south of the city of Lisbon, has long-been a wine producing region. It is not known exactly when Moscatel – which is made from the Muscat grape, although the name also refers to the grape itself – was first made here, but it is generally accepted that the Phoenicians and Ancient Greeks were trading the wine in the estuary of the Sado River.

Ever since former President Deng Xiaoping opened China’s economic doors to the rest of the world starting in 1979, foreigners wishing to do business in China have had to find a local partner to form a joint venture company. Though no longer a hard-and-fast requirement, that’s still the modus operandi at Lotus Eatery, where a founding partnership brings together the best of both culinary worlds: unusual yet authentic local flavors and distinctly foreign notions of consistent quality and attentive service.

Istanbul's dessert culture mirrors the richness of its broader culinary diversity and depth, and the city is home to numerous classic establishments that have essentially perfected favorite Turkish sweets. There’s Özkonak’s tavuk göğsü, a dense, thick pudding made with shredded chicken breast and topped with cinnamon, and Mahir Lokantası’s irmik helvası, a subtly sweet mound of semolina paired excellently with a dollop of vanilla ice cream. Despite these and numerous other beloved desserts having firmly established their places on Istanbul's menus, the city also has a penchant for being consumed with the latest trends, often hybrids of local staples or imports from afar. In 2012, we remember lots of folks going berserk over trileçe, a version of Latin America’s tres leches cake, which one can guess from the name is traditionally made with three types of milk.

It is 1760 and on the throne in Naples is King Ferdinand IV. Pietro Colicchio has opened Pizzeria di Pietro e basta così, and the name says it all: “Pietro's Pizzeria and that's enough.” A restaurant strictly selling pizza, it will become known as one of Naples’ first pizzerias. As we move into the 19th century, Raffaele Esposito and his wife Giovanna Brandi take over Pietro’s, which is located on via Chiaia, the city’s “good sofa” as they say in Neapolitan, meaning one of the best and more elegant parts of the city. It’s here that Brandi Pizzeria creates a legend of its own, without the help of Pietro.

For over a century, the dense downtown Exarchia neighborhood, located near the National Technical University and the Law School of Athens, has been deeply connected to the city’s students. Greece’s first student revolution took place there in 1901, resulting in the resignation of both the leading government and the Archbishop of the time. Since then, Exarchia has maintained its revolutionary spirit, displaying its most prominently during the Athens Polytechnic uprising against the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. An everlasting sort of vendetta has remained between the student population of Exarchia and the police – often with dramatic results. Everything is recorded on the walls of the neighborhood, in the form of mostly political graffiti that covers any reachable surface, as well as many seemingly unreachable ones.

Editor's note: We're celebrating Mushroom Week at Culinary Backstreets, and today's installment takes us to Istanbul's Belgrade Forest, where Turkey's leading wild mushroom expert has found some remarkable fungus specimens. “This would be front-page news in France!” Jilber raved, darting off between tall chestnut trees and oaks, obscured by a hazy steam that seemed to hang in the forest like a gauzy Halloween decoration. He looked over each shoulder and all around him where it seemed he was surrounded by golf balls, shanked off and forgotten in the rough.

We recently spoke with Mexican chef Pati Jinich about her new cookbook, Treasures of the Mexican Table: Classic Recipes, Local Secrets (Mariner Books; November, 2021). Pati is host of the James Beard Award winning and Emmy nominated public television series Pati's Mexican Table and has published two other cookbooks on Mexican cuisine – the first also called Pati's Mexican Table (Mariner Books; March 2013) and the second, Mexican Today (Mariner Books; April 2016). She is also the host of the new PBS Primetime special La Frontera, where she travels along the Texas-Mexico border to explore its food and culture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.