“We’ve tried our best to return to deeper ways of cooking,” says Beatrice Ajaero, sitting in the front room of Nneji (nn-Nay-jee). The name of her grocery and takeaway restaurant – which opened in Astoria during the early summer of 2020, not long after the coronavirus pandemic crested in New York City – has been translated, simply, as “mother.” That’s too pat a translation from the Igbo language of southern Nigeria, Beatrice explains. “May I never be disconnected from my maternal heritage” gives a fuller sense of the meaning. More prosaically, “nneji” expresses the desire that “may I never forget where I come from.” On the signage outside the shop, three words echo that spirit: “Africa, food, kindred.”

The bright spots of dandelion yellow and sleek tabletops at Makana in Istanbul’s Beşiktaş district are a far cry from the cozy interiors of the Uighur restaurants dotting the multicultural streets of Zeytinburnu and Çapa. But after one bite of Makana’s dry-fried lagman, we know: Uighur cuisine has arrived in Beşiktaş. The neighborhood needs it. With three universities in walking distance of its formerly working-class çarşı (downtown), Beşiktaş has become a central location for Istanbul’s more youthful crowds, who have returned with gusto after three months of empty streets and sporadic lockdowns due to Covid-19. Yet compared to other Istanbul neighborhoods, it has had a dearth of original, quality places to eat.

Served as a sauce, romesco is certainly striking: It has an intense dark orange color and a dense texture that saturates and blankets whatever you dip in it. Once in the mouth, you get a piquant touch of vinegar, which is soon enveloped by the nutty creaminess of ground almonds (or perhaps hazelnuts) and olive oil. Yet the sauce’s main personality (and taste) derives from the roasted tomatoes and the rehydrated nyora peppers (ñora in Spanish), both of which are also responsible for its distinctive color. A versatile and tasty picada (pounded paste), romesco works as the base of the famous cold sauce (salsa romesco) but is also used in various dishes like monkfish romesco and mussels romesco. It has come, in its many forms, to represent the culinary culture of Tarragona, a province in southern Catalonia.

In 2013, Anthony Bourdain and the Parts Unknown team arrived in Batumi, the capital of Adjara, to shoot the first segment of their Georgian adventure. The show’s producers invited Zamir Gotta, a Russian sidekick unfamiliar with the city, to join him. They visited a casino, strip club and mediocre restaurant for khashi, tripe soup, which failed to impress Bourdain. When the episode aired, local social media users flamed with disappointment over the Batumi portion in particular: “Casinos and strip clubs! That’s not Batumi!” While they aren’t the places we would have taken Anthony Bourdain, they are most certainly Batumi, along with the rainy summers and stifling subtropic air, the new five-star hotels and crumbling Khrushchyovkas (Soviet apartment buildings), a McDonald’s housed in an award-winning modern structure and a chacha-spouting fountain that dried up shortly after it was built in 2012.

In Total Kheops, the first book in his iconic Mediterranean noir trilogy, Jean-Claude Izzo writes how Marseille is “a place where no matter who, and no matter what color, can descend from a boat, or a train, his suitcase in hand, without a cent in his pocket, and assimilate in the sea of other men...” Crossroads city, transit city, refugee city, promised land. For over 2,600 years – Marseille has the longest-operating port of any coastal Mediterranean city according to AGAM (the city’s Department of Urban Planning) – immigrants have disembarked in the harbor here, creating a cosmopolitan culture that is unique in France.

Considering its prime location between the Acropolis and the neighborhoods of Petralona, Kallithea and Neos Kosmos, the fact that Koukaki has seen a wave of development in the last 15 years is no surprise. Cafés, bars, restaurants, hotels and Airbnbs have sprung up all over the neighborhood, making it an increasingly popular destination for visitors. At the same time, life has become something of a headache for long-time residents – with so many apartments being turned into Airbnbs, property prices have gone up significantly, and the neighborhood has become too noisy and busy, particularly during the high season.

If we had to describe the landscape, idyllic would be the first word to come to mind. But while the sunflowers initially command our attention, our eyes soon drift downward, where tomatoes of different shapes and colors, from yellow to red, orange green to black, are growing bigger and ripening. Brothers Miguel and Diogo Neiva Correia, the two farmers behind Hortelão do Oeste, are showing us around this immense vegetable garden. It’s a hot late August day in most of Portugal, but at the farm, which is located one hour north of Lisbon, near Runa, in the municipality of Torres Vedras, it’s cool and breezy. Miguel and Diogo are meticulous, telling us all about the tomatoes, peppers and corn in great detail.

Even with a wealth of international brands and supermarkets, Istanbul neighborhoods are by and large dominated by small shops specializing in certain food products. Greengrocers sell fresh, seasonal produce; fishmongers offer a glimmering array of fish, particularly in the winter months; and bakeries boast a staggering variety of breads and pastries. There are even shops specializing in honey or organ meat. Most neighborhoods, no matter the quarter of Istanbul, also have a local yufkacı, a quintessentially Turkish store specializing in yufka and other unlu mamüller, flour-based products. Yufka, paper-thin sheets of unleavened dough, have ancient roots within Turkish cuisine. The food is listed (albeit under the slightly different name “yurgha”) in the 11th-century Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk, the first comprehensive dictionary of Turkic languages.

Take the plunge into the high-volume hubbub of Tbilisi’s famous Deserter’s Bazaar and you’ll come under a three-senses assault. The piquant aroma from the spice stalls, a butchers’ shouting war and stalls swinging with burgundy-brown, candle-shaped churchkhela sweets. But on one side of the market building, there’s a small slice of calm – in the long corridor where the cheese sellers work. Selling homemade cheeses from across the country, delivered fresh every day, is a more relaxed and deliberate business. You’ve heard of the Slow Food movement. Perhaps it’s time we were more specific and talked about “slow cheese.” Here, the cheese sellers prefer to wait for the customers to come to them.

I fell in love with the island of Kimolos the first time I set foot on it about 15 years ago, while sailing in the area. It’s small enough to get around on your own two feet and has an enchanting simplicity – I could easily picture myself retiring on the island, in a small whitewashed house with a wood-burning oven in the yard, raising a couple of goats and growing tomatoes and grapes. Part of the Cyclades, Kimolos sits right next to the larger island of Milos and small uninhabited islands like Polyegos, Agios Efstratios and Prasonisi. It has been continuously inhabited since at least the late Neolithic Age (5300-4500 B.C.), while legend has it that the island was named after its first inhabitant, Kimolos, the husband of Side, who was the daughter of Taurus.

Like a lot of us, the Galicia family was looking forward to 2020. Farming along the city’s southern canals for generations, they are stewards of the chinampa agricultural system, one of the oldest on the planet. For the past eight years they have been slowly converting their man-made plot – built on top of the city’s shallow lakebeds – into a fully organic farm. When they first started they could barely afford a hose to water the plants. Now they have their own DIY biodigester (a device that turns decomposing matter into natural gas), several biofilters on a small side canal that runs along their property and a large greenhouse that covers one section of the harvest during Mexico’s hottest months.

At Tai Er Suan Cai Yu (Tai Er Chinese Sauerkraut Fish), there are four rules: 1. You can only have four people max at one table at a time, and no latecomers will be seated. 2. No baby chairs allowed. 3. They will not adjust the spiciness level. 4. No takeout (although this restriction has been lifted during the pandemic). Take into account these restrictions, and also the fact that queues of diners can mean a wait of close to one hour during peak mealtimes, and you wonder why anyone would go to this restaurant. In reality, Tai Er is one of China’s biggest domestic success stories with over six million fans on WeChat and Weibo (China’s Facebook and Twitter equivalents) and 120 locations throughout China.

On June 1, when Portugal entered the third phase of its lockdown exit, normalcy was still an elusive feeling. It was a mild Monday in Porto, the country’s second largest city, and the bars and restaurants that were open had few patrons. But as summer unfolded and cases remained low in northern Portugal, the city seemed to come back to life, with residents slowly recovering their routines, including going out to eat and drink again. Outdoor seating and terraces are especially popular, for obvious reasons. Canti, a bar on Largo Mompilher that was scheduled to open in March, finally flung open their doors in June but saw little demand for their indoor tables. “We have followed the government restrictions in our room inside, but everyone wants to stay in the outdoor area,” says Tiago Caetano, one of the owners. “Luckily we’re in the summer season,” he adds.

Right after our Mexico City Trip, immerse yourself on this add-on trip in the complex cultural identity of Oaxaca, where pre-Hispanic, colonial, and contemporary influences collide.

The line between legend and actual history is often blurred by time, particularly when it comes to the origins of beloved foods. Such is the case of Oaxaca’s most popular cheese, quesillo, a type of string cheese that’s a member of the pasta filata (“spun paste” in Italian) family, similar to mozzarella. The most widespread origin story is that in 1885, Leobarda Castellanos, a 14-year-old girl in charge of preparing the cheese at her family’s business, got distracted and let the milk coagulate past the exact point for making cheese. To avoid being punished, she tipped hot water over the milk, accidentally creating a gummy product that unexpectedly became very popular among the clients of the Castellanos family in the Oaxacan village of Reyes Etla, the official birthplace of quesillo.