In recent years, the city of Guadalajara has grown so much that it’s starting to merge with the little pueblitos surrounding it. That’s the case with San Isidro, which is now a highly urbanized area but where you can also find some places that still feel like the old days. One of them is Fonda Doña Mica, a must-visit breakfast spot that was a well-kept secret until it went viral a year ago, famous for its traditional cooking and handmade wood-fired tortillas. Driving 40 minutes from the city center just to eat here may sound crazy, but hundreds of people do it daily – that’s how good it is.

New Orleans’s king cake is a culinary symbol of Mardi Gras and the festive, months-long lead-up known as Carnival season. Beginning on January 6 and continuing until the season’s culmination on Fat Tuesday – this year taking place on March 4 – revelers across the region enjoy slice after slice of this traditional, cinnamon-flavored cake. Whoever finds the small, plastic baby figurine hidden inside is said to receive good luck, but must also purchase the next king cake.

Our friends who visit often ask, “What’s the spot in Tokyo for X,Y, or Z?” We explain that this is not how the city works. There are numerous microcities that make up this megacity, and it’s more of a question of: “What’s the best __ in this area?” There is one exception when it comes to the best yakitori (grilled chicken) restaurant in Tokyo: the answer is, without a doubt, Shimonya in the southwest neighborhood of Shimokitazawa. Shimonya has been around since 1998, when they opened their first yakitori store in Araiyakushimae Station in Tokyo. Since then, it has grown into a vast empire of 65 eateries spanning nearly every corner of Tokyo. Most of them specialize in chicken, with a handful branching out into beef and seafood as well.

Warm phở broth is comforting on rainy days, fresh pickled veggies in a bánh mì are refreshing during hot summers, and fried pork rolls are a popular snack to pair with at any time of the year. But the lesser-known Vietnamese dish called bánh khọt gives us yet another reason to fall in love with Vietnamese food. This bite-sized dish is a crunchy one-inch, cup-shaped crepe, made from rice flour and coconut milk batter, topped with shrimp and ground pork and served with pickles and fresh lettuce for a hands-on, do-it-yourself wrap. One local place to try the dish is Bánh Khọt Lady, a restaurant in the Little Saigon neighborhood of Orange County, an area that is often overshadowed by its neighbor to the north, Los Angeles. Although LA County has the highest population in the country, the “OC” is not far behind, ranking as the sixth-largest county in the nation. Both counties share a deep, diverse history and culture, dating back to the Native American Tongva people who lived in the area before waves of settlers and immigrants called it home.

Images of neon-lit bar streets, serene temples, and clouds of cherry blossoms have long enticed travelers to Japan. But the last couple of years have seen the country’s popularity rise to unseen heights, with a record 37 million foreign tourists visiting in 2024. While last month we launched in Osaka (a culinary powerhouse in its own right) and have published dispatches from Kyoto, we’ve been writing about the food scene in Tokyo for a decade, watching the city evolve with each passing year. We know that, for all its allure, Tokyo can feel overwhelming to navigate, especially when it comes to food. Countless izakayas, sushi bars, noodle joints, and cafes are tucked into every corner – where do you even begin?

Let me first say that Japan hit me very hard when I first arrived because I did not speak the language. I was not a pork eater at the time (I grew up on a farm and pigs were my pets, not dinner) but after my first two weeks in Japan all I was eating was basically breaded pork chops, because that's the only thing I knew how to order in Japanese. You eat or you starve. And when it gets to that point, it's just being able to order that’s the first barrier.

At Gulgune, a barbecue restaurant in Itaewon, the meat arrives on double-prong skewers, par-cooked over charcoal until just done. A server deftly slides each long strip of samgyeopsal – pork belly – onto a tilted grill pan set over a gas burner, the drippings falling into a vessel below. As the meat browns to golden, a trio of accompaniments sizzles at the pan's bottom: blanched bean sprouts, chopped ripe kimchi, and curls of green onions tossed in a sweet, spicy, and vinegary dressing. Cooked in the rendered fat, they cut perfectly through the meat's richness. For Koreans, samgyeopsal isn’t just a meal – it’s the heart of countless gatherings. The question “고기 먹을까?” (“Shall we go for some barbecue?”) almost always means pork belly is on the menu.

On this full day tour in Guadalajara, we’ll explore the delicious contradictions that make this historic yet dynamic Mexican city such a singular culinary destination.

The history of Oaxacan food is deeply linked to the concept of adaptation. Our culinary identity has many chapters: the Mesoamerican native period, the colonial reign of Nueva España and the Mexico of the 20th century, which received another wave of immigrants who brought their gastronomic traditions and let them combine with the native and more tropical ingredients of these altitudes. That is the story of the salchicha ejuteca, a European style beef sausage that unexpectedly became one of the most desired foods on the Oaxacan snack table. While traditional corn-based products are a signature of Oaxacan cuisine, the salchicha ejuteca is an underestimated traditional element in the state’s food landscape. “Nobody knows for sure where the salchicha comes from.

Nevizade Street is one of the most buzzing parts of the Beyoğlu district, the heart of nightlife and cultural activity in Istanbul, but it has weathered its fair share of ups and downs in recent years. For a variety of economic and political reasons, Nevizade's vitality has suffered, and we’ve had to witness the closure of some of the area’s most emblematic spots. But just last year, a fantastic new restaurant here brought together an unlikely pair who have quickly formed what is without a doubt the area's most dynamic duo: Ibrahim Usta and Mehmet Akkök. With his beaming smile, white hair, and bushy eyebrows, Ibrahim Usta (usta being “master,” as of a craft) became famous for the delicious hummus that he whipped up in Antakya for nearly four decades. When the February 6, 2023 earthquakes struck, his home was destroyed, leaving no choice but to pack up and move to Istanbul to live with his son.

During the winter months, we all like to curl up and hibernate a bit with our favorite calorie-packed, stick-to-the-bones comfort food. In France, that might be a cassoulet, which has its origins in Castelnaudary, a town in the Occitanie region. Or perhaps a boeuf bourguignon from the Burgundy region in eastern France, or a gratin dauphinois from the Dauphiné region in the country’s southeast. Here in Marseille, we often enjoy a big bowl of coucsous, brought to the city from Tunisia or Algeria and prepared in local eateries by the restaurateurs of Maghrebi heritage. All of these dishes are crave-worthy, but the king of kings, a simple dish that practically everyone will show up for when invited, is the fondue Savoyarde from the Savoie region in the French Alps.

In the heart of Seoul's Central Business District, a short stroll from the Jonggak and Anguk subway stations, Baekbujangjip has quietly built a reputation for serving one of Korea's most unassuming yet comforting dishes: dakhanmari. Chicken soup is a universal comfort food, found in countless forms around the world. In Korea, dakhanmari carries the same meaning of nourishment and a sense of home. Served in a communal pot, dakhanmari is more than just food – it’s a soothing ritual for workers and passersby seeking a brief escape from the city’s relentless pace.

Look at Bangkok through the lens of Instagram, a travel article, or a listings website, and these days the city’s restaurant scene can appear to be all about Michelin stars. The brand swept into the city in 2017, and in a short time, chefs and diners alike became obsessed with collecting its celestial accolades. At press time, 35 Bangkok restaurants can claim at least one Michelin star – in 2024, one restaurant earned three – and the company continues to have a massive impact on the city’s dining scene. Yet look at Bangkok from ground level, and you’ll see a very different picture. The curry shacks, noodle stalls, legacy restaurants, and street vendors that have shaped the city’s dining scene for decades continue to put out some of the best value, casual, unselfconscious, full-flavored, delicious food on earth, all while blissfully unaware of a French tire manufacturer’s rating system. Michelin may have grabbed peoples’ attention, but this has added to, rather than taken away from, Bangkok’s food scene.

Few locals, let alone tourists have reached the isolated mountain village of Ghebi in Georgia’s northern borderlands of Racha. However, many have passed through the doors of its namesake basement restaurant in the bustling left bank district of Marjanishvili in downtown Tbilisi. For more than a decade, the eatery has been steadily serving up comfort food from the region including lobio, the red bean stew with or without the aged Racha salted ham called lori, bean-stuffed pies called lobiani, and skhmeruli, the garlic saturated pan-roasted chicken dish. Located on Aghmashenebeli Avenue, which is more well known for its profusion of Turkish lokantasi diners with ready-made buffet spreads and Arab restaurants that attract many of the city’s foreign residents and visitors from South Asia and the Middle East, Ghebi remains a staunch local haunt frequented by tables of Georgian men toasting their chachas late into the evening over tables loaded with food.

Scott Kohno knows when a new customer is about to come into Yama Sushi Marketplace because he hears the locked front door rattling. As the store’s regulars are already well aware of, the front door isn’t used at Yama. There’s a sign out front that directs customers to enter through the back door, where the parking lot is located. The small store is divided into two rooms. Upon entering from the back door, there’s a small table in the center with cute Japanese stationery items, and pantry items and bottles of sake line the shelves to the right. A refrigerator on the left is full of cold drinks, nigiri sushi, and sushi rolls that have been packed that day. The second room is where one finds the heart of Yama Sushi Marketplace: the fish counter. Hungry customers take numbered tickets and wait their turn to get freshly sliced sashimi.