Slices of strawberries bordered by pillowy puffs of pistachio cream. The fluted caramelized crust of custard-y canelés. Tidy layers of dark chocolate ganache, coffee buttercream and almond biscuits in an opera cake. The term “culinary arts” is at its most appropriate when considering the work of a pastry chef. Especially when the pâtisserie is hidden in the back of an art gallery. Parenthèse Enchantée is the second act for Nathalie Gnaegy. “Cooking was my weekend pastime,” she explains. Nourished by sharing food with her family and coworkers, she “progressively veered towards baked goods, more welcome at the office than a half-eaten whole tuna,” she winks. Her appreciative officemates insisted she should “bake professionally.”

The concept of what’s near and far has gone topsy-turvy as of late. In the last decade, before the pandemic hit, far was near: We could have breakfast in Barcelona, get on a plane and arrive in time for lunch in Athens. Nowadays, the other side of one’s municipality is considered far-flung, and going there to eat at a restaurant you’ve dined at a hundred times before is a big adventure, one worth documenting on social media. While we felt that distance keenly during the state of emergency, we could also close our eyes and imagine ourselves back in our favorite restaurants, sitting down to eat our favorite dishes.

Everything is ready at Mangia e Bevi. The tables are spaced out, the seats reduced from 60 to only 18, in the kitchen Marilena – owner Luigi Grasso’s wife and the trattoria’s cook – is dressed like an astronaut, the wine is chilled and wonderful smells waft from the kitchen. My favorite restaurant, “my” Trattoria Mangia e Bevi, has reopened after being closed for 80 days. And that’s already good news. “I’m so happy to see you again,” Luigi exclaims, while we touch our elbows, both protected by masks that hides our smiles.

When people ask me what’s my favorite time of the year here in Athens, I always say it’s spring and particularly April. That is when all the Seville orange trees lining the streets of Athens – both downtown and in the suburbs – blossom and perfume the whole city. I can spend hours walking around and inhaling the wonderful scent. The common orange is believed to be a naturally occurring hybrid between the pomelo and the mandarin. There are many different varieties and other hybrids that have evolved, but they generally fall into one of two categories: sweet (citrus x sinesis), which includes varieties such as the navel orange, the Valencia orange, the blood orange and the Jaffa orange, or bitter (citrus x aurantium), which includes the Seville orange, the trifoliate orange and the bergamot orange.

Covid-19 has brought most of Mexico City’s restaurants to a halt. But Antolina in the Condesa neighborhood has found a way to keep its kitchen active. “We were about to shut [the restaurant] down when we got the idea of doing something different to keep breathing,” says owner Pedro Sañudo. Pedro, known to his friends as Pete Mezcales, has long collaborated with maestros mezcaleros (mezcal makers) to promote the drink and ensure that they are paid fair wages for their labor. As part of this work, he founded Corazón de Maguey, which offered craft mezcals as well as superb food, in partnership with the restaurant group Los Danzantes, a collaboration that lasted 10 years.

The last time I was in a restaurant was March 7. I had bumped into three friends at Sulico Wine Bar and after draining our last bottle of wine we walked down to Republic 24, chef Tekuna Gachechiladze’s latest tour de force. Recalling the lustrous pork belly and the devilish succulence of her khinkali is making me salivate like a thirsty vampire, particularly after burping the blasphemous supermarket khinkali we pulled out of the freezer and boiled for lunch just now. We evacuated Tbilisi shortly after that, stoked up the wood burner in Garikula and unpacked our bags. With a pantry packed with provisions, our first weeks in the village went by as pleasantly as could be during a global pandemic.

When France’s confinement forced many businesses to shutter, certain Marseille restaurants, cafés and bars found a way to keep busy. Some made meals for healthcare workers or packed their dishes in to-go containers. Others became pick-up points for produce-filled paniers from local farms, or makeshift épiceries – topping tables with artisan foodstuffs, booze and flowers. Like other cities across the globe, home cooking became the rage. A constant line snaked from the Monoprix on the sidewalk below my balcony. The owner of my organic market said they’ve never been busier since people had “more time to cook” and “less places to eat out.” I joined the culinary masses, making time-consuming comfort food like slow-roasted lamb and chicken stock. Monotonous tasks like peeling fava beans became meditative rather than annoying.

I had just met Rahime, a tiny but strong woman in her 60s, when the coronavirus pandemic started to spread in Turkey. My new neighbor, she moved to Kadıköy from her beloved Beylikdüzü, on the other side of Istanbul, and was excited to discover the area. In fact, she had already made new friends in the neighborhood and had plans to partake in the activities organized by the Kadıköy municipality. Maybe it was the dire situation in my home country, Italy, but I felt extra protective towards everyone around me, especially if they were in what doctors deemed the “high risk” category. Since the authorities weren’t giving detailed information or instructions yet, my boyfriend and I felt obliged to warn Rahime about the risks and to encourage her not to go out.

Over the last three months, as the Covid-19 pandemic forced us indoors, the members of my family have put on an average of two kilos. We spent lots of time cooking and talking about food, planning out the week’s menu well in advance. We prepared everything at home: bread, pizza, noodles, cakes and biscuits. My daughters even made sushi! In supermarkets, yeast was nowhere to be found, and we witnessed frenzied scenes whenever flour arrived. But there are some foods that just cannot be prepared at home, and these were the ones we craved.

You never think that it’s going to be you. But one day, everything goes topsy-turvy, and suddenly you find yourself doing the unimaginable: searching for information on how to access donated food or meals. Thousands of individuals and families in Spain have found themselves in this difficult position during the Covid-19 pandemic. City councils in Catalonia have seen double the normal number of petitions for assistance in the last month or two, while that figure has tripled for Cáritas, the large Catholic charity in Spain. And the Creu Roja (Catalan Red Cross) has received around 10,000 new petitions per week since Spain’s state of alarm began, over 60,000 in total.

Restaurants closed in Athens on Friday, March 13. For Sophia Vracha, it was a “horrible” day, a real “Friday the 13th,” as she put it. Together with her parents, Nikos and Mary, Sophia runs Kissos, a taverna in Chalandri that I wrote about when things were still “normal,” just about a month before the city went into lockdown. While it was a hard day for the family, they had seen it coming. “There was a rumor out and about in the week before it happened,” Sophia said. As she described it, a general feeling of uneasiness and insecurity was in the air. People really began to panic when Covid-19 arrived in Italy, thinking that it was just a matter of days before the virus would come to Greece.

This year was going to be a big one for Oda Family Winery. Since its humble beginning in 2016, the winery and family farm-to-table restaurant in western Georgia’s Samegrelo region had been carefully expanding with the increasing popularity of its outstanding wine and formidable fare. This year, Keto Ninidze and Zaza Gagua calculated 3,000 guests would visit their restaurant, located in the front yard of their family’s oda (a traditional wooden two-storey house) in Martvili, so they emptied their savings and added new washrooms and a storage room for wine equipment, made a larger garden, and advertised for seven more employees to add to their staff of three. Then coronavirus arrived. “Thank God I didn’t hire any of the applicants and they didn’t leave their jobs,” Keto says.

The dining room may be empty but João Gomes, his wife, Adelaide, and their son, Nuno, still beam a warm welcome as I enter their tasca. Monday – the first day when restaurants in Lisbon were allowed to open – was slow, they explain, and Tuesday was not much different, with only a few people sitting down for a meal. But they have faith that their regulars will start coming in June. “Things will get better, people are still fearful but they will come back,” João tells me. Their tasca, Imperial de Campo de Ourique, is one of the great classics still left standing in the city. They had sold out for many days in February and early March, as lamprey season was in full swing, but now that feels like a distant memory.

Considering that there are more than 40,000 cultivated varieties, it’s no surprise that rice has fed people so successfully for so long. Many believe the wonder crop was first cultivated in China as early as 2500 B.C. before spreading to Tibet, India and beyond. It was in India that one of Alexander the Great’s military campaigns came across rice in the 4th century B.C. In his work Geographica (“Geography”), Greek geographer Strabo (c. 62 B.C.-24 A.D.) quotes a source from the campaign: “The rice, according to Aristobolus, stands in water in an enclosure. It is sowed in beds. The plant is four cubits in height, with many ears, and yields a large produce.”

Domestic tourism is back on the menu in China, as new daily cases of Covid-19 drop to single digits across the country. Earlier this month, China’s Tourism Research Center reached out to the newly unlocked-down to see what their top domestic destination was for 2020, and Chinese travelers chose Wuhan as their number one spot. While the epicenter of the virus outbreak might seem like an unlikely travel destination, Chinese netizens are rallying around the city, citing a desire to help it rebound economically as the main reason for choosing Wuhan. It’s the natural extension to the cries of “Wuhan jiayou!” heard round the country during the worst moments of the pandemic here.