Wandering around the neighborhood of Çarşamba, home to a famous weekly market and close to the sprawling Fatih Mosque complex, we get the distinct impression that this area is honey central: the streets are lined with shops selling the sweet nectar, particularly stuff coming from the Black Sea region. “This area is full of honey sellers,” Aslan confirms on a cold November afternoon after we took refuge in his store, Balmerkez, “but there is no place like this.” He’s right – there’s something about his storefront that we found particularly appealing on that cold day. Perhaps it’s because Aslan’s little shop looks more like an atelier than a commercial outlet. Pots, containers, glass jars and wicker baskets are stacked high on the shelves – a honey lab may be a more fitting description.

With a new lockdown in Portugal, it feels as if we’ve entered another dark period of the pandemic. Once again, food and drink have become a central concern and source of comfort: Planning meals, cooking, shopping or just thinking about food seem to occupy our brain in an almost obsessive way. For Lisbon’s restaurants and cafés, the focus is on creating food for a different type of consumption. Since only takeaway and delivery are currently allowed, many are developing special dishes or menus that are better suited to travel. Here are a few of our favorites, although it was hard to choose from the many delicious options.

Anthony Bourdain liked to say the body is a playground, a sentiment we couldn’t agree with more, especially when digging into the cholesterol-laden acharuli khachapuri or wiping a ketsi clean of its spicy pool of kupati – Georgian sausage – grease with a piece of bread. Shots of chacha and glasses of wine make us swing, bounce, teeter-totter and sometimes fall, and in the morning when the fog and pain clears, we may remember that the body is also a fragile temple requiring more ministration than a sacrificial bowl of tripe soup can provide. In Tbilisi’s Mtatsminda district there is a sanctuary providing both solace to devotees of healthy eating and penance to gluttonous sinners like us. No ordinary hummus bar, this affectionate “eating apartment” is called Mama Terra – Veggie Corner.

Born right before the Covid-19 storm, Taberna Noroeste opened its doors in February 2020, mere weeks before the pandemic hit Spain and strict confinement forced them to close. It was a turn of events that spelled disaster for many established restaurants and food businesses, let alone one that was brand new. Yet this project from the chefs Javier San Vicente and David López has grown healthy and strong, despite the hardship, and emerged with a unique culinary identity, now known across the city for elevating the popular cuisines of Galicia and Castilla y León (Castile and León, in western Spain) while incorporating Catalan touches.

Nodding to a table laid with bars of alegria, rainbow-colored obleas, and packages of churros and chicharon made with amaranth flour, Alma Rocha says she can remember her grandmother making sweets from amaranth seed, but nothing like the repertoire that she and her husband, Arturo, have now. Everything is shiny and neatly packaged below the D’Alva Productos de Amaranto sign in the cooperative’s workshop, which is located inside the home of 43-year-old Alma and 58-year-old Arturo. “They taught us [recipes] in a certain sense,” Arturo says, referring to the generations of amaranth farmers that came before them, “And we have tried to modify them. For instance, this one here that we are making now, uses honey [instead of regular sugar], the chocolate one here, that’s local chocolate from Oaxaca.”

We recently spoke to Marianna Leivaditaki about her cookbook, “Aegean: Recipes from the Mountains to the Sea” (Kyle Books, September 2020), which delves into the cuisine of Crete, the largest island in Greece and one of its most distinct. Marianna grew up on Crete, where her father was a fisherman and her mother ran the family’s restaurant, before later settling in the UK – she’s now the head chef at Morito Hackney Road in London. A skilled storyteller, she weaves an enveloping portrait of life on the island, which is simple but simultaneously rich, and presents its cuisine through a personal lens. The end result is a transporting love letter to Crete, an island with so much to give.

Normally the lead up to Lunar New Year (春节, chūnjié) results in the “great migration,” with people in China's big cities traveling back to their ancestral hometowns to enjoy the annual reunion dinner (团圆饭, tuányuánfàn, or 年夜饭, nián yè fàn) with their family. Nearly every shop and restaurant closes up for at least a week (and sometimes more like three), as employees travel back to inland provinces like Anhui and Henan for a well-earned break and the chance to eat traditional, home-cooked meals with relatives.

Everything at NAM 43, from the exposed wood beams that extend across the space to the Neapolitan tuff, an ancient stone, embedded in the walls, reflects a philosophy of recycling. (Except the food, of course, which is fresh every day.) In fact, it was one of the basic principles that inspired 50-year-old Raffaele Montesano to take over the space, an old antique shop, in early 2016 and turn it into a bistro, one that would enhance classic Neapolitan offerings with gourmet touches. “I love minimalist furniture,” Raffaele tells us. “The tables came from a school canteen in Emilia-Romagna [a region in northern Italy] and were won at an auction.”

So ubiquitous as to be rendered almost invisible, the sticky bottles of soy sauce that decorate every table, counter and shelf in Japan are never far from reach. Both an ingredient and a condiment, there isn’t a chef in the land who would begrudge a diner a dash of the sleek black sauce – be it at a Michelin-starred sushi restaurant or a back street ramen joint. While the bottles are often slung behind stacked menus, their everyday presence is no sign that their contents should be underestimated. As common as table salt but infinitely more complex, the sweet, salty mix offers a glimpse of the sought-after umami flavor Japan is famous for.

Greek stifado is a special dish: It requires time to prepare but the result is succulent, rewarding and stomach-warming, like stews ought to be. Tender, juicy chunks of meat are patiently cooked at low heat amid a sea of small pearl onions in a rich red wine sauce flavored with warming spices and herbs, like allspice, cinnamon, cloves, bay leaves and rosemary, that I tend to associate more with the winter season. By the end, the onions go glossy and caramelized in this delicious sauce and the pieces of meat are fork tender. The word stifado derives from the ancient Greek word tyfos (τύφος), which means steam. This is the root for the Latin word estufare, from which the Italian stufato (or Venetian stufado), the Italian word for stew, was born.

For us, the neighborhood of Mtatsminda has long been associated with the sour smell of tear gas. When riots broke out over a stolen election in 2007, we found ourselves on a Mtatsminda side street, between a line of riot police below and protesters armed with bricks above – a very dumb place to be. A cop aimed his tear-gas gun at us and shot. We ducked behind a car and the canister broke its windshield, setting off the alarm and filling the sedan with a cloud of gas. Yet in recent years, Mtatsminda’s streets have been filling up with a different scent: the wafts of outstanding cooking. Or at least they were until Covid-19 came to town.

You would think Sérgio Oliveira, the owner of Conga in Porto and the secret-keeper of its legendary recipe for bifanas, would be tired of the restaurant’s signature dish. But you’d be wrong. “As much as I try not to eat it, I cannot. It is impossible,” he says. "One always eats it; there is no chance not to.” It’s a simple but addictive dish. Pork, cooked all day in a mysterious spicy sauce and stuffed into a piece of bread that looks a bit like a roll– at first glance, it does not seem to impress. But Porto continues to hide the best and tastiest of its secrets in the simplest things in life.

Located at the eastern edge of Marseille, Saint-Julien is a far cry from the bustling city center. Here, congested boulevards stretch into narrow streets, and birdsong, not the honking of scooters, fills the air. The residential neighborhood has mostly standalone houses, from 17th-century bourgeois bastides (farmhouses) to 20th-century homes built by immigrant families searching for a small-town vibe. One of them feels like it’s set in an Italian village, thanks to an enterprising Sicilian. Liliane Casteldaccia runs Sicile Authentique, an épicerie, restaurant and small catering company, out of the ground floor of the house in which she grew up. At the foot of the driveway, the wood-paneled dining area is peppered with maps and Italian memorabilia.

Located near the end of Akşemsettin Street in Istanbul’s Fatih district is a small yogurt shop that radiates history. Barbaros Yoğurtçusu has been around since Kemal Kurap’s grandfather Abbas came to Istanbul from Albania at the dawn of the 20th century and established the business in 1918. The current location in Fatih was opened in 1946, but the brand’s name comes from its original locale at the Barbaros Hayrettin Paşa ferry pier in the district of Besiktaş, named for the legendary Ottoman naval commander. Like the owners of other classic dairy shops in the city, the Kurap family belongs to a rich tradition of Balkan dairy producers that made their way to Istanbul in the latter years of the Ottoman Empire.

It’s hard to imagine now, but Alvalade, a neighborhood north of downtown Lisbon and close to the airport, was comprised mainly of fields in the early 20th century, with farms in the area supplying the Portuguese capital with dairy products as well as fresh fruits and vegetables. Those farms may be long gone, but this residential neighborhood is still famous for its high-quality produce – except rather than being grown on the land, it’s sold at the Mercado de Alvalade, a municipal market that opened in 1964. Although the produce comes from MARL (the large central wholesale market north of Lisbon), a lot of it is still grown in the fertile region north and west of Lisbon.