Walking through Tokyo’s Shin-Okubo neighborhood – AKA Koreatown – can be sensory overload. It’s Saturday night, and we weave through throngs of people along Okubo Street, passing crowded cafes and Korean cosmetics shops. The soundtrack of Korean pop music drifting from every restaurant and café is punctuated by shouts from inside a Korean grocery or the blare of a pachinko parlor. Every shop is painted in an audacious purple or pink or else a dazzling orange or yellow, competing for attention. Scents of foods spicy and sweet drift from storefronts. Tokyoites come to Koreatown for two reasons: shopping and food, but we haven’t come to shop. The crowds thin out along Shin-Okubo’s backstreets, though the shops and restaurants are just as packed.

FICO Eataly World has been described in a number of ways – agricultural park, glorified supermarket, mall, bazaar, and production center have all been tossed around – but it was the moniker “the Disney World of food” that grabbed our imagination, conjuring up fanciful images of a log flume powered by wine instead of water and Mickey Mouse transformed into a giant ball of mozzarella. The reality isn’t quite as whimsical (although the venue does have an animated fig mascot, a plump green character whose rotund belly recalls the Kool Aid Man). The self-described “agri-food park,” which occupies a former wholesale market on the outskirts of Bologna, is like Eataly, the Italian food hall and market “concept” that has seen success across the world, but also not.

Editor’s Note: This photoessay was created by CB’s Lisbon-based photographer Rodrigo Cabrita. The subject is a year in the working life of João Rafael, an agricultural worker living in Portugal’s interior and struggling to maintain his way of life. In the text below, Rodrigo explains how his project got its start. I first met João while on assignment for a Portuguese magazine that covers the agricultural sector. It was the harvest time and he was finishing his day working on the grape harvest. He was splattered with grape juice and tired because of the long day’s work, but agreed to my request to take a picture of him. We ended up talking more, with him telling me about his everyday life, and that’s when I thought his story could make an interesting project.

Editor’s note: In the latest installment of our recurring First Stop feature, we asked Queens-based food writer, culinary tour guide and consultant Joe DiStefano to share some of his go-to spots in Queens. Founder and publisher of the Queens-centric food blog CHOPSTICKS & MARROW, he authored the recently released book “111 Places in Queens That You Must Not Miss.” Joe has been exploring the borough’s diverse global cuisines for more than a decade and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Gourmet, Food Republic, and Serious Eats. One of the first things I heard when I was putting together 111 Places in Queens That You Must Not Miss, was “There’s too much food.” It was my editor’s not so subtle way of reminding me that I was hired to write an overall guide to Queens, not a tome devoted to the borough’s amazing culinary complexity.

The neighborhood of Kesariani, built on the lower slopes of Mount Hymettos and located around 3 kilometers east of central Athens, has long been a culinary destination, particularly for seafood (even though it’s nowhere near the water). Many of the old seafood restaurants survive to this day although the neighborhood’s offerings have expanded to include other types of eateries – nothing too fancy, mostly mezedepolia, or meze houses. What makes these spots so appealing is their relaxed, convivial atmosphere. It’s a feeling that permeates the entire neighborhood, where old houses built by Greek refugees from Smyrna (or Izmir) still stand next to modern apartment blocks.

Going to dinner at a Georgian restaurant typically means having to fast all day. The table will bulge with must-orders: tomato and cucumber salad, badrijani (eggplant stuffed with garlic and walnuts), an assortment of cheeses and wild greens, and probably pkhali (vegetable pate with walnuts) too. There will be meat, lots of meat – lamb, pork, veal and chicken that will be stewed, baked and roasted – and bread to clean the plate with. Perhaps there will be a grilled trout. And don’t forget the khachapuri, because that is just the way it is. After several hours at the table, we will make our final toasts, take one last look at the leftovers, maybe snatch a farewell nibble at a loose chive or slice of cucumber and then waddle out of the joint, with greasy grins and logy eyelids. We grunt while we plop into the taxi and groan as we struggle to climb out when we get home.

Let’s go back in time to 1981 – the beginning of a decade of hope in Lisbon. Portugal is about to enter the EEC (European Economic Community, precursor to the European Union), and word on the street is that funds will start flowing into the country and living standards will improve. People really need to believe that word, as the inflation rate is almost at 20 percent and the illiteracy rate even higher. Next to the always busy Santa Apolónia train station, a new snack-bar opens. Green Apple is the chosen name. The owners? A pair of Josés. José Carlos, from Tábua, right in the heart of Portugal, between Viseu and Coimbra, and the minhoto (from Minho, northern Portugal) José Brandão. They are not serving hearty dishes – yet – but rather quick meals, grab-and-go type food: toasts, burgers, sandwiches, etc.

The easiest way to pick out a bodega in Barcelona is to look for big wooden wine barrels – they always, and we mean always, feature prominently in these taverns. Locals frequent their neighborhood bodega for myriad reasons: some come to buy affordable bulk wine from the barrels to take home, others to have a vermut (vermouth) with anchovies, or other drinks and tapas, for an aperitif. Sometimes, in those special cases where the bodega evolved to include a kitchen, they also come to enjoy a magnificent meal. These living monuments were, and still are, witnesses to Barcelona’s history, from the Spanish Civil War to the gentrification and intense “touristification” currently taking place in the city. If the walls of Barcelona’s bodegas could talk, we would eagerly listen to the stories of neighborhood life in Barcelona over the last century

To crudely paraphrase Freud, sometimes a taco is not just a taco. That would certainly seem to be the view held by Steven Alvarez, an Assistant Professor of English at St. Johns University in Queens, New York. First at the University of Kentucky, where he previously taught, and now at St. John’s, Alvarez has been leading a course called “Taco Literacy,” which uses the humble Mexican dish as a way of exploring and unpacking such heavyweight issues as immigration, bilingualism, assimilation and acculturation. It’s a lot to pile on top of a tortilla, but as Alvarez sees it, food speaks – often times in two or more languages – and it can be “read.” Listening closely to what food has to say, Alvarez explains, inevitably leads to hearing the stories of the people making the food.

That much of the past seems to stick to Samatya is a marvel in Istanbul, a city being rebuilt and “restored” at an alarming pace. First, there’s the question of its name. Occupying a stretch of the Marmara Sea and squeezed between the old city walls and Kumkapı, an area home to a rotating cast of eclectic restaurants, the neighborhood still goes by its Greek name (Ψαμάθια or psamathia, likely derived from the Greek word psamathos, meaning sand) even though it was rechristened as Kocamustafapaşa after the foundation of the Turkish Republic. Perhaps more importantly, it’s imbued with a certain type of nostalgia.

As forty three countries get ready to compete in the 63rd edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, the crowds have descended upon Lisbon. The city has the privilege of hosting this year’s contest because in 2017 the young Portuguese singer Salvador Sobral was crowned the winner of Eurovision with his melancholic love song “Amar Pelos Dois,” which was written by his sister, Luisa. Paying tribute to Portugal’s folk traditions, his stripped-down performance was a far cry from the kitschy bombast normally presented on the Eurovision stage. In spite of (or perhaps because of) the bad hairdos and costumes and the usually uninspired songs that range from camp to downright strange, Eurovision is one of the world’s longest running and most popular music competitions.

Tacos Beto is not a pretty place. Stacks of soda bottles, enough for weeks to come, serve as a wall that shields customers from the wind blowing down Avenida Dr. José María Vertiz. The plastic tables and plastic stools that surround the bottles seem older than the invention of plastic. A long, dusty awning hanging above the sidewalk seating advertises a brand of soda that Tacos Beto no longer carries, maybe never carried. The only visible beauty encountered at the restaurant sits on the arched wall above the steel fryer, or comal bola – orange and blue paint spell out the words “Tacos Beto – los de cochinada” (“Tacos Beto – the garbage ones”).

From the start, I knew that I wouldn’t find what I was looking for: my great uncle’s baklava shop. A large office building rises where his shop used to be, right around the corner from the dome of St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in Astoria, Queens. But I still couldn’t help looking up the address. My great uncle, Michael Eliades, owned two pastry shops in Astoria, one being the Kismet near St. Demetrios, which employed my grandfather when he first arrived in the United States. When my family sought to leave Istanbul, Turkey, it was my great uncle who got my grandfather a visa as an “Oriental pastry chef.”

Despite the big wooden casks on the wall and the creaky shelves crowded with bottles behind the bar, wine is no longer king at Cal Siscu, an old bodega (wine store and tavern) in Hospitalet de Llobregat, a city located on the periphery of the Barcelona metropolitan area. The new ruler, who has deigned to keep these old relics from an earlier era, is seafood – every day the bar’s counter is covered with trays of majestic treasures from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic like prawns, clams, barnacles and sea snails. Founded by Francisco “Siscu” Rosés in 1933, Cal Siscu originally sold bulk wine and liquors. At that time, the only seafood served came from a can. Customers frequented the tavern, which also doubled as a home (Siscu and his family used to live upstairs), to fill up their wine jugs and sip on a vermut with some olives and conservas like tuna or sardines.

Back in the days when we spent more time living without electricity than with, when the police had the sole function of extorting money from citizens, and we were never sure whether the Borjomi mineral water we were buying had been mixed in a bathtub, there weren’t many options for diners desiring a break from the generic Georgian menu of those times. Of course, there were the Turkish steam table restaurants in Plekhanov, but our spoiled western palates periodically demanded more. There was Santa Fe, a Tex-Mex inspired restaurant we can credit for introducing “Caesar Salad” (with mayonnaise!) and “Mexican Potatoes,” spud chunks fried with a generous dusting of paprika, which have somehow become staples on virtually every Georgian menu in the city. Then we discovered a place with flavors our taste buds were no strangers to.