Tbilisi

Tartan: Take-Out Wizards

You are motionless, stuck in a traffic jam after a long day at work while your stomach growls. You know the rest of the family will be hungry when you get home and that the fridge is empty and sad. Shopping and cooking is out of the question, so you turn onto a Vera side street, zig-zag through one-way lanes to Tatishvili Street, double park, and run into a tiny gastronomic oasis that has been saving lives like yours for nearly a decade. Its name is Tartan. Located in a step-down ground-floor apartment, takeout cafeterias don’t get homier than this. The front room is taken up with a long counter of refrigerated display cases half filled with enough ready-made dishes to lay down a feast when you get home.

Barcelona

Blessed Bakery: Convent Sweets from Santa Maria de Jerusalem

When we think of Spanish convent pastries, we imagine a group of old nuns gathered together in the dark and humble kitchen of some small Gothic or Baroque cloistered convent, hidden away in the old part of town. We picture them working quietly, baking elaborate, time-consuming treats from ancient recipes that have been passed down over the centuries by the previous nuns who lived there. Yet when it comes to the only convent in Barcelona that still makes sweets to support themselves, we should throw our biases out the window – Santa Maria de Jerusalem defies all stereotypes.

Lisbon

É Um Restaurante: The Helping Kitchen

When Crescer, a non-profit association focused on the social integration of Lisbon’s vulnerable populations, was tasked by City Hall to create a restaurant that would serve the homeless three years ago, the association’s top brass had another idea. “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.” With this saying as their guiding philosophy, Crescer proposed a different venture: a restaurant where the homeless could gain professional experience and training that would allow them to integrate into the community and find a job. In other words, tools for a better future.

Athens

Harry’s Kitchen: Top Pies

Pies go back a long way in Athens. Harry’s Kitchen, a tiny pie shop on Axarlian, a small pedestrian street near Syntagma Square, does not – this hole in the wall only opened around a year ago. Yet the pies that Harris Satiridis, the shop’s namesake, and his wife, Yiouli, put out have already gained a reputation as some of the best in Athens. You could easily miss Harry’s Kitchen, it’s that small, but you won’t miss the queue of people outside, waiting to get their hands on one of the very tasty-looking pies in the small display case. And after biting into one, you’ll better appreciate why pies have been enjoyed in Athens since antiquity.

Tbilisi

Wine Harvest 2019: Grape Expectations in Samegrelo

We used to spend a lot of time in western Georgia’s Samegrelo region when breakaway Abkhazia was our beat. Zugdidi, the regional capital, was our overnight stop coming and going across the river to the disputed land in the north. Our local friends would welcome us with Megrelian hospitality, decorating their tables with hearty and spicy local fare that made us purr. The wine, however, with its sweet barnyard vinegary tang, was a different story. We assumed that this subtropic-like land, with its year-round lushness and mandarin, hazelnut and overgrown tea fields, was hostile to good wine grapes. We didn’t realize back then that the practice of making sugar-wine was not exclusively a Megrelian thing, but a Communist legacy practiced throughout the country.

Marseille

Patisserie Orientale Journo: A Taste of Tunisia

At a typical pâtisserie orientale, the front window is often stacked with towers of sweets – honey-soaked visual merchandising to entice passersby to pop inside. Some pastry shops line their walls with colorful geometric tiles and Moorish arches, the icing on the Maghreb cake. Pâtisserie Orientale Journo goes for a decidedly more subtle approach. Though located a block from Marseille’s main drag, the Canèbiere, this unassuming shop is somewhat lost in the shuffle of the pedestrian Rue de Pavillon. The few tables scattered out front suggest that there’s food to be found inside but the open storefront is bare – save for a giant five-gallon water jug propped on a stool, with a hand-scrawled sign “citronnade – 2 euros” beside it. That’s all the advertising needed for a pastry shop that has survived by word of mouth for 60 years.

Lisbon

O Velho Eurico: Family Inheritance

Zé Paulo Rocha was born in September, 22 years ago. By December of that year, he was already sleeping on top of a chest freezer in his parents’ tasca, right behind Rossio, one of Lisbon’s main squares. Like so many tasca owners in the Portuguese capital, they had come to Lisbon from northern Portugal’s Minho region years before. As a young teenager, Zé Paulo used to help with the service while his mother cooked and his father ran the business behind the counter, the traditional family tasca format. His professional fate was sealed from the beginning.